


Black Hole Theory

by Casylum



Category: Wheel of Time - Robert Jordan
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-27
Updated: 2013-08-27
Packaged: 2017-12-24 19:34:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/943819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Casylum/pseuds/Casylum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Black Hole (/blæk hol/) [var. "wormhole" (/wərm hol/)]: A hypothetical topological feature of spacetime that would be, fundamentally, a "shortcut" through spacetime. Can take any form, from your standard black hole in space, to your not so standard mailbox on the outskirts of Chicago. (Lake House AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black Hole Theory

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks a bazillion to Red, for doing the art for this fic, and to Indigo, for doing the beta job on it.
> 
> Wordcount is 25051, a fact that AO3 seems bent on ignoring.

Chapter One: August to November (2000)

 

~  
“Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.”  
― Gabriel Garcí¬a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera  
~

 

When she has to leave, she’s surprised by how hard it is.

 

She’d only rented the house under duress: it was the only property that was going for under five hundred a month in the Chicago area (a term that was applied very loosely, as it was a forty-five minute drive up to the North Side from its perch over Lake Michigan), and she needed a place to stay while she looked for an apartment closer to the hospital. 

 

Duress had turned to actual fondness over the long summer she spent there, as her irritation at the impractical whimsy of the design turned into a deep appreciation of the fact that it was hard to waste one’s day when the sun was always right there, and so was the water it insisted on reflecting off of.

 

Nynaeve’s pretty sure she tanned in that house, her normally caramel skin darkening to a deep mocha. She’d worry about melanoma, or more importantly, people watching her through the thin glass that makes up the walls, but there’s no history of it in her family, and the only people she’s seen out here are herself and a few dogged looking fishersen floating their way towards warmer waters. 

 

In the end, its only her, a box of things she’d kept inside so she could get ready for today, and the dog.

 

“You coming or not?” Nynaeve asks, an eyebrow going up, arms aching slightly from all the boxes she’d hauled out last night, The dog gives her a look, then trots primly out, plumed tail high in the air, and she follows, laughing at her antics even as her heart sinks at the thought of leaving.

 

~~~

 

She’s four miles down the road when she remembers the letter.

 

“Shit, shit, shit,” she mutters to herself, keeping her hand off her braid by force of will and a desire not to flip herself doing a u-turn on a dirt road in Illinois of all places. Fifteen minutes later, she’s back in front of the house, her heart giving a false leap at the fact that she’s coming back. 

 

The mailbox is at the end of the long path that leads out to the dock that leads out to the front door, a convoluted distance she remembers thinking was extremely pointless and irritating but is now missing more than she ever thought she would. It’s the work of two seconds to dig the letter out from the glove compartment, lean out of the car window and stick it in the open mouth of the mailbox.

 

She puts the flag up with a creak, and the jaunty strip of red metal is the last bit of the house she sees as she drives away, its form clear and bright against the blue of the sky.

 

~~~

 

Getting into the Chicago is an exercise in patience and seeing how much classic rock the dog can handle. 

 

She’s done it before, when she was looking for places, going for interviews, but for some reason it seems longer now that there’s nothing for her to go back to. When she finally pulls off into the vaguely residential neighborhood that her apartment is located in (if you count residential as holding more apartment buildings then business high rises), it’s only a small relief. 

 

She’s still got to move all the boxes in, get her keys from the manager, a whole host of other things she doesn’t really want to think about just yet. There’s parking in front of the building, thank god, and Nynaeve’s out with the dog next to her pulling cardboard carton after cardboard carton out and up three flights of stairs that have become the very devil after twenty minutes, her new minted keys jangling brightly off of the ring tucked into her waistband.

 

When it’s dark outside and the air is buzzing with the drone of street lamps instead of crickets, she finally stops, looking around what’s now her own, and unfortunately finding it lacking. There’s only one window, its view a fascinating slice of the parking lot below and the building across the street. 

 

Nynaeve thinks, if she squints a bit, leans to the far left, and stands on tiptoe, she might just be able to catch a glimpse of Lake Michigan, but that’s probably just wishful thinking.

 

A half and hour later, she and the dog are asleep, passed out from exhaustion on the mattress in the other room.

 

~~~

 

Her first day is hell, but she expects that. 

 

She’s learned to anticipate the rush of ‘oh fuck’ that comes from working in an ER, as patients come in before she’s ready for them, before she’s finished fixing up the last guy, and there’s no one else there because it’s noon and the other residents are all out on lunch break. That, at least, her stint up in Two Rivers had taught her, but on a much smaller scale. What she hadn’t known was how much of a smaller scale it was.

 

Nynaeve’s there at 0630, a half an hour before her shift starts, and she’s already wandering, trying to find a doctor who doesn’t look like they’re going to commit murder if the person standing in front of them doesn’t move right fucking now. It’s a hopeless task, one that almost gets her slammed into a broom closet as a code comes rushing down the long hall, but it’s not like she can leave.

 

She finally sees someone who looks marginally less harried, a tall woman with long silver hair pulled back into a bun that’s almost frustratingly perfect. “Excuse me,” Nynaeve starts, coming up beside her, almost putting a hand on her arm but thinking better of it. “I’m looking--”

 

The woman shoves a clipboard in her hand, and keeps walking, forcing Nynaeve to keep up with her longer strides. “Fill this out,” she says brusquely, neatly dodging a gaggle of what looks like family members led by a harassed intern. “And then go find an attendant, I’ve got work to do.”

 

It only takes a few seconds of skimming to realize that it’s a patient intake form, and Nynaeve looks up to see that the other woman is already five feet ahead and gaining fast. 

 

“Wait,” she shouts, knowing she’s being the complete opposite of dignified and under control but dammit, it’s her first day and it’s earlier than it has any goddamn right to be. Catching up to the woman (who hadn’t slowed in the slightest), she pants, “No-Not a patient. I’m a doctor. Nynaeve al’Meara.” 

 

Finally the other woman stops and turns, giving Nynaeve a once over that would have made her flush with anger if she weren’t so focused on breathing regularly. Finally she nods, and holds out a hand. “Cadsuane. Melaidhrin if you have to fill out any forms or put the fear of God into anyone, but Cadsuane should do well enough.” Nynaeve shakes her hand, and prays that the rest of the day goes better than this.

 

It doesn’t.

 

She’s got twenty-two cases to start, patients with varying degrees of severity scattered around seven or eight unfamiliar wards on what feels like a minimum of thirty floors. It’s 1345, halfway through her twelve hour shift, and she’s stuck somewhere in pediatrics with no idea how to get out. There are several helpful signs directing her towards staircases and elevators tacked to the walls, but all of them seem to be leading her in circles. 

 

Nynaeve’s standing in front of the nurse’s station, braid in one hand, and the slowly shrinking stack of folders in the other, and she’s about to scream until her head explodes, or the hospital collapses, or both when she’s hailed from behind. She spins, braid flying free and folders almost following, to see a blonde woman with a smile that seems almost impossible under the hospital’s fluorescents.

 

“Nynaeve, right?” the blonde says, tugging slightly on Nynaeve’s elbow once she’s within range. “Elayne. I couldn’t help but noticing that you looked a bit lost?”

 

“The walls keep moving,” Nynaeve mutters, allowing Elayne to pull her towards a bank of elevators she hadn’t noticed before.

 

“They do that,” Elayne says, laughing as she leans on the down button. “Where’re you headed?”

 

“ICU,” Nynaeve says, flicking through her stack, “then an MRI, two in the regular wards, and back up to oncology.”

 

“Damn, Cadsuane’s really putting you through the wringer,” Elayne says, stepping backwards as the elevator opens, gesturing for Nynaeve to follow.

 

“I’m pretty sure she thinks that it’s fine if I keel over, so long as I do it while doing something useful,” Nynaeve says, sighing a bit, leaning heavily on the flimsy panels that line the walls. No one can blame her if she lets herself go a bit in the elevator; it’s not like she can make the bloody thing go faster, might as well take advantage of the few scant moments of peace. 

 

“That sounds like her,” Elayne grins, then moves to leave as the doors open with a soft ding. “Your floor’s next.”

 

“Thanks,” Nynaeve says, then slumps even further as the doors thump shut behind her.

 

~~~

 

Somehow, some way, she makes it through the rest of the day, Her patients are taken care of, her paperwork is (mostly) filled out, and she’s not dead from general exhaustion. The locker room is a safe haven, one she realizes that she’s going to appreciate more and more in the coming days. Elayne’s there when she slumps in, her and another girl, a brunette Nynaeve’s seen around but hasn’t talked to yet. 

 

Hell, she barely had time to talk to Elayne, but she’s still smiling and waving from across the stretch of linoleum. 

 

“How was your day?” Elayne asks when she gets a bit closer. “I know I saw you earlier, but you were fresh out of the gate then.”

 

“Less run down,” the brunette puts in, her eyes crinkling a little.

 

“Run down is a good way to put it,” Nynaeve replies, fingers fumbling over the lock in a combination of newness and sheer exhaustion. “By a Mack truck would be my diagnosis. Little to no hope of recovery.”

 

Elayne laughs. “You’re good. You’ll be good.”

 

Nynaeve grunts, any care for dignity lost, and yanks open the locker door.

 

“I’m Egwene, by the way,” the brunette says, and Nynaeve pauses to raise an eyebrow in her direction. Egwene grins. “My parents were very spiritual in the seventies. Mom says she meant to write Megan on the birth certificate, but she was so blitzed on the ‘herbal’ tea the midwife gave her she forgot how to spell it.”

 

Nynaeve huffs a short laugh, and drags the backpack that’s been serving as her purse-slash-carry-all until she unpacks and can find her real purse out of the locker, slamming the door behind her.

 

“So,” Elayne says, dragging out the syllable. “We were going to go over to the Eagle, you know, detox.”

 

“Or retox,” Egwene adds, picking up a bag from somewhere behind her and slinging it over her shoulder.

 

“Wanna come?” Elayne finishes, her eyes opening just a little wider.

 

Nynaeve stares at her for a minute, then down at herself, then over at Egwene, who’s give her an identical look.

 

“Where is it?” She finally says, knowing she’s going to cave, but trying to delay it just a little more. “Because I’ve got a dog at home, and she hasn’t seen a person since--” she checks her watch “--yesterday.”

 

“Five blocks down, towards the lake, near the park,” Elayne says, grinning.

 

Nynaeve squints in thought for a moment, trying to remember unfamiliar streets and the relative location of her apartment to a park she hasn’t even had time to visit yet. “I can do it,” she finally decides. “But one of you has got to come with me, because I am not driving around downtown looking for a bar.”

 

The other two women exchange looks, and then Egwene steps forward. “That’d be me, then.”

 

A few more moments of prevaricating, and they were all out the door, Egwene having reassured Nynaeve that she rode her bike to work and that Nynaeve really wasn’t inconveniencing her in the slightest.

 

When they get to her apartment, Elayne having left them in the parking deck with a smile and a bike strapped to the back of her Toyota, Nynaeve invites Egwene up, mainly because politeness won’t let her leave a near-stranger alone in her car while she runs up to her apartment. The door opens quickly, and then Egwene is treated to a fabulous view of the sea of boxes that have managed to migrate from the neat piles Nynaeve was sure she’d made the night before and into the middle of the floor. 

 

The dog doesn’t seem to mind though, justs bounds through the makeshift obstacle course like a hyped-up jackrabbit to scrabble at her legs. She smiles apologetically at Egwene, mutters something along the lines of “I haven’t had time to unpack”, then pushes the dog off to go in search of her food. She finds it, after a bit of swearing and an incident with one of the drawers that Egwene has vowed never to repeat, in the refrigerator. Nynaeve only vaguely remembers putting it there, and the reasoning behind it is lost to her. 

 

She dumps out what’s left of the bag, and then digs around in one of the boxes for a pad of paper while Egwene plays with her nearly comatose from attention dog. Buy dog food, she scrawls across the top, and then after a second adds, and people food. You can’t subsist on bar food and kindness forever. 

 

“You ready?” she asks, digging in her work bag for her wallet and keys after she’s finished writing her list, which now also includes a note about the light that’s been flickering over Egwene’s head for the last five minutes or so.

 

“Yeah,” Egwene says, straightening. “You’ve got a cute dog, you know? What’s her name?”

 

“Dunno,” Nynaeve replies, dumping her bag on the counter after retrieving what she needed. “She came with the house, you know? Collar, tags, everything but a name. Didn’t seem right to give her one if she already had one and I just didn’t know it.”

 

Egwene gives her an odd look at that, but then she and the other woman are out the door, down three flights, and back into the parking lot and Egwene’s trying to give directions, but keeps getting sidetracked by stories about what she and last year’s residents had done in the various shops and clubs that seemed to surround Nynaeve’s area like a buzzing hive of pressed medical student activity.

 

~~~

 

Two hours later, she’s more than a little bit sloshed and is more than glad that Egwene had taken her bike off of Elayne’s car, somehow fit it into Nynaeve’s backseat, and driven her home. She gets to her apartment alright (she isn’t that drunk), and decides very solidly against attempting any sort of lighting. 

 

The dog is awake, probably because of the noise of the door opening, but she’s up on the windowsill, body draped in a fluffy slump, head turning back to the shifting lights of the street outside. Nynaeve comes over to stand next to her, hand scratching into a ruff of fur, eyes blearily fixed on the place she thought she’d seen the lake earlier. When the dog whines softly, she smiles softly, and smooths out the area she’d been scratching.

 

“I know what you mean,” she says, and she and the dog stay that way for a very long time.

 

~~~

 

It’s been two months and Nynaeve is finally, finally, finding her rhythm.  
Three days a week are spent on twelve hour shifts at Northwestern, shifts that generally end up stretching closer to sixteen, but she’s given up caring. When she’s got the time, and Elayne and Egwene are free, she goes with them to the Eagle and unwinds as much as she dares. Even Cadsuane has stopped giving her the evil eye, her presence at some of Nynaeve’s bedside visits more of an exercise in extended grudging approval instead of outright disdain.

 

The dog is getting used to the confines of the apartment, and Nynaeve’s adjusting right along with her. The lake, and the house beside it, seems to be nothing more than a memory hazed out by summer heat and a never ending breeze. Besides, the city has her own beauty, even if it is harder to find.

 

She’s off today, eating lunch in one of the cafes around her apartment, with the dog tethered to the leg of her chair. It’s sunny, a rare burst of relative warmth and light that’s a welcome break from the chill winds and grey skies pulled over by the lake to the east. It doesn’t mean that she can wear short sleeves, but it does allow her to take off the heavy wool coat she’d been wearing in favor of the sweater underneath.

 

Nynaeve’s just about to take another bite of the sandwich sitting in front of her when the dog sits up, ears going forward. She looks around to see what got her attention, thinking that maybe Elayne had gotten her message, or Egwene had gotten off early for lunch. They knew where this cafe was, had introduced it to Nynaeve about a month ago during one of Cadsuane’s short vacations. It wasn’t a completely foreign idea that any grouping of the three of them might meet here by accident.

 

A quick sweep of the tables around her and the busy street puts that thought to rest, and Nynaeve starts to turn back to her food. Her hand’s on the bread when there’s an awful screeching groan accompanied by a series of desperate honks, and her head snaps around in time to see a man thrown bodily from the grille of a Mack Truck, hard enough to slam into the asphalt of the now hopelessly snarled intersection. 

 

She doesn’t think, she just moves.

 

“You,” she grabs the shoulder of a man a table over, “go inside, tell the manager to call 911.” He nods, shaking but moving, and then she’s running as fast as her damnably short legs will let her, dog and coat forgotten in a desperate rush to get to the scene. 

 

“I’m a doctor,” she shouts as she comes abreast with the thickening line of horrified spectators, and it’s like the Red Sea, a blur of gruesomely interested faces parting to let her get through. Nynaeve slams to the ground with a jolt, her knees stinging from the abuse, and looks up at the lean Indian man on the other side of the downed victim. 

 

“Who’re you?” she says rudely, knowing that this is wrong wrong wrong, she should be in the OR with a team of nurses, not out here in the street with some stranger’s blood seeping into her jeans.

 

“Driver,” he says, sounding panicked, his hands clamped firmly over a spot on the victim’s leg, blood still pumping sluggishly between his fingers. “I didn’t see him, didn’t know he was there, oh my god, he won’t stop bleeding.”

 

“It’s fine,” Nynaeve says uselessly, hands starting to move as her ears pick up on the distant wail of sirens. “He’ll be fine.”

 

~~~

 

He wasn’t fine. 

 

Not even close to fine. He came in with both lungs punctured, more broken bones then Nynaeve could count, and a nicked femoral artery. It was a miracle he’d made it as long as he had, lying there in the street, and she can’t help but think that if she’d been there a little sooner, if the ambulance had been just a little faster, he might have lived.

 

Cadsuane finds her in the break room, sitting dully in front of a replay of Days of Our Lives, clothes still spattered with blood.

 

“Leave,” she says abruptly, causing Nynaeve to turn around fast enough that her braid smacks her hard across the face.

 

“What?”

 

“Leave,” Cadsuane repeats. “Get out of here, get out of the city.”

 

“But--,” Nynaeve starts, confused.

 

“You put your all into that man today,” Cadsuane says, her voice softening minutely. “You put your all and it still didn’t work. From what I remember, it’s the first time you’ve lost anyone.”

 

“Hard to lose people in Emondsfeld,” Nynaeve says absently. “Nothing there but tractors and idiots.”

 

“The point still stands: you’d never lost anyone. Now you have. You need to leave.”

 

“I don’t--”

 

“You’ll thank me later,” Cadsuane says firmly. “ Elayne’s picking up your shift tomorrow, and you’re off for the rest of the week. Go.”

 

~~~

 

Chapter Two: September to November (1998)

 

~  
“Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.”  
― Gabriel Garcí¬a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera  
~  
September is a horrible time to be moving anywhere, even in the Midwest, but Lan’s doing it anyway.

 

Not like he had much choice; Siuan had kicked him out two weeks ago with a dire proclamation involving his shortened life span ringing in his ears. So he’d packed his boxes with the few things he actually owned, put his half of the townhouse up for rent, and came here.

 

He drags a box to the tailgate of his truck and takes a look at ‘here’. Still the same dock, the same blocky, yet oddly graceful mishmash of wood and steel and glass, with his father’s ridiculous tree rising out of the water to wend its way through the center of the floor. He’s been avoiding the place, would have continued to avoid the place if he’d still had a job, a sense of purpose, an employer who didn’t currently reside in a six-by-three patch of ground in Mount Olive. But here he was, pushed by Siuan into not just visiting the place, but living in it.

 

Lan sighs, and then picks up the box.

 

~~~

 

After he’s moved in, with everything taken out and folded into the chest of drawers he’d brought with him, he’s exhausted.

 

He hasn’t got much, just a platform bed, a desk that’s seen better days and a chair to match, and the aforementioned bureau. It’s quiet, he realizes, with no rush of car engines and rubber swishing against asphalt. There’s a slight lapping sound, like a leaky faucet, but he knows from previous visits that it’s the lake brushing up against the stilts of the house, slapping lightly before it slid around and continued on its way. 

 

Lan blinks for a few moments, trying to figure out if there’s anything else he’s supposed to do. When nothing comes to mind, he topples backwards onto the bed, asleep before he remembers that he hasn’t changed.

 

~~~

 

The first day at the house goes alright. 

 

There’s a letter in the mailbox that he puts aside for later, and he’s relieved to see that the phone company hasn’t cut service. He makes some calls, and receives some, with Siuan hounding him to take another job and Leane doing the same thing in a more quiet way, though no less hounding. Gareth takes his call, listens, and tells him he’s got an appointment with the Dean at the University and he’d better make sure he’s there.

 

Lan’s glad for that. He may not want to pick up another bodyguard gig now, but he does still want to do something with himself. The fact that Gareth knows Davram Bashere needs a stand in for one of their military history professors is just pure dumb luck, and he’s grateful. Luck and him haven’t been in lockstep for a while now, and he intends to relish the few minutes of grace that he has

 

Noon has him realizing that he doesn’t have any food in the house, beyond a half eaten Snickers bar that’s definitely seen better days. The grocery store is still where he remembers it, though the paint’s a different color than it was when he was a kid. An hour and one very abused credit card later, and he’s rattling back towards the house, his mind noting the fact that the engine sounds a bit off and pushing a block of time tomorrow on his mental schedule to look at it.

 

His meal is a sandwich slapped together in an explosion of meat and cheese and half-heartedly remembered lettuce. Lan eats it standing up, a glass of tap water standing on the counter next to him as he stares out at the water. It’s a little choppy right now, a storm blowing down from the north whipping up the inland version of whitecaps. The sky is an unforgiving slate gray dotted with white clouds, and the wind’s howling around the walls and shaking the base of the central tree.

 

Hurricane weather, his dad used to call it when it got like this, even though he’d never experienced a real hurricane in his life. Good for you. Cleans the air, cleans the earth, reminds you you’re alive.

 

“Tut tut, looks like rain,” Lan says to the empty house after he’s finished eating, and then goes to make sure that all the windows are closed.

 

~~~

 

The house doesn’t lose power, thank God, but even with lights it’s still a bit of an experience.

 

Lan’s sitting cross legged on the floor next to the tree, a lamp next to him, and a beer next to that, listening to the lash of rain that increases in time with the moan of the air. If he hadn’t known what it was like when the weather got up, he might have been concerned for his safety, or certainly the integrity of the house, but he’s been here before. The house screams as the land wails around it, and then settles back when everything’s calmed down. The most he has to worry about is losing is the deck furniture he doesn’t have.

 

He’s got the letter from earlier with him, the paper looking yellow in the lamplight. It hasn’t got a name on it, no address, nothing but a blank whiteness. Lan pulls the flap open, absentmindedly notes that it hadn’t been sealed, and pulls out the single sheet of paper. 

 

~~~

 

[contents of one LETTER written on 28 AUGUST 2000]

 

Dear new resident,

 

Hello, and welcome to your new home. 

 

Congrats on choosing this place; she’s a bit odd to begin with, but once you get to know her, it’s a good house. Honestly, if you doubt me, just take a moment and look around you. Breathe in that fresh air, relish the fact that, if you squint and cross your eyes a bit, you can’t even see any skyscrapers. 

 

The post office is supposed to be forwarding my mail, but if you end up receiving anything addressed to a Nynaeve al’Meara, just send it to the address below.

 

[an ADDRESS in CHICAGO’S NORTH SIDE is printed in steady handwriting, though a bit messy, as though the writer isn’t used to disconnecting all of their letters]

 

Thanks.

 

[a sloppy SIGNATURE, recognizable only because of the distinctive ‘N’]

 

P.S. Sorry about the paw prints by the front door, they were there when I moved in, and I liked them too much to get them painted over. Same with the box in the attic; I think it’s the owner’s. Just shove it to the side.

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

He reads it once, shakes his head, and reads it again. And again. “What the hell is this?” he finally says, voice echoing slightly in a brief lull of outside noise. He stands up, letter in hand, and goes over to the front door. There’s nothing there, the floor completely clear of anything, paw prints or otherwise. Lan then turns and goes up to the small attic space located over the master bedroom. No box, just a few stubborn dust bunnies and what he thinks is a dead beetle.

 

He sits back down in the pool of light from the lamp with a frown. It makes no sense. Besides the date being wrong, the details mentioned in the short note are completely wrong. There are no paw prints, no box, and this house hasn’t been occupied, or hell, on the market, since his parents were alive. Eventually, after a third readthrough, he rolls his eyes, puts the letter back into the envelope, folds it into messy halves, and sticks it into one of the side drawers in the kitchen when he goes to throw away his beer.

 

~~~

 

The next two months pass in a whirlwind.

 

He got the job over at the university, old Davram Bashere shaking his hand like he’d just won the lottery, though with an air of calculation that Lan couldn’t help but notice. His moodiness didn’t disappear, but he found it was a hell of a lot harder to brood when he had a semester’s worth of lesson plans to write and assignments to grade. 

 

About halfway through September, he caved and signed on a TA, some punk kid who looked like he belonged in bar fights more than the command track, but Mat Cauthon had impressed him with his analysis of guerilla tactics as used in the Vietnam War, so there the kid was. Loud, obnoxious, and prone to bouts of prolonged bitching, but he got the job done, to the point that Lan knows that when Mat leaves for winter break he’s going to miss the kid.

 

But winter break is a month off, and Lan’s taking advantage of a relatively clear day to repaint the dock, resealing it against the elements and checking for weak spots as he goes. He doesn’t want to be trapped in his own house if the world freezes over and takes half of his only path to land with it. The dread of slipping on a patch of ice is already too much, as is the thought of his heating bill for the next few months. Glass walls are all very well for the view, but they’re shit for insulation.

 

He’s halfway through the stretch of weathered boards, having slowly worked his way from the land out when his ears pick up the click of claws on a hard surface. His head goes up in time to see a dog of indeterminate everything splash through the paint tray and sprint past him through the open door, a trail of dove grey paw prints following it into the house. He stares, looking at the splotches of paint, part of his mind thinking of the work it’s going to take to get those up, and another part niggling at something that he can’t quite remember.

 

~~~

 

Lan finds the dog in the kitchen, curled up on one of the heating vents, and can’t bring himself to do anything to it except clean its paws. The trail of prints had stopped about three feet out from the door, the paint running out, but there were still straggling bits on the dog’s fur. The location jostles something loose, and he goes to dig around in the drawer next to the refrigerator, lifting a jumble of odds and ends, and finally finding what he’s looking for.

 

The paper’s a bit yellow now, the crease he’d put in it when he first had it out now a permanent part of it, but the words are the same. Still untrue, with even the address being an empty lot that Lan drove by every day on the way to work. 

 

The paw prints though...those are new, and those are true and it doesn’t make any goddamn sense.  
At night, after he’s eaten and given the dog a bath and figured out that it’s a ‘her’, he sits down at his desk with the notepad he uses for lesson planning and scrawls out a short note. He feels dumb as hell doing it, because he still doesn’t quite believe what he’s seeing, and putting two and two together is liable to make his head explode, but he also feels that he has to.

 

In the morning, the note goes in the mailbox, and the flag goes up, and Lan only feels slightly insane as he drives off

 

~~~

 

Chapter Three: 6th November to 7th November (1998/2000)

 

~  
“Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies.”  
― Gabriel Garcí¬a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera  
~

 

She’s in a haze, but at least she’s thinking, at least she’s going places.

 

She calls the realtor she’d used in the summer, finds out that the house is still empty, and puts down a payment for a month’s rent right there. An overnight bag is easy, packed in twenty minutes, and then she and the dog are out, in the car and driving the reverse of the route they’d traveled--god, was it only two, it felt like a lifetime--months ago. 

 

The radio’s not on this time; all Nynaeve wants to listen to is the slowly decreasing sounds of the city, relish in the fact that by the time she reaches the turnoff for the house, the only thing she can hear is the dog’s panting and her own engine rumbling softly under the hood. The house looks the same as she left it, though leaves are drifting in the yard and clogging the gutters, and the tree that runs through the center is surrounded by a halo of its own dropped foliage. 

 

The dog’s up and out as soon as she stops, barking and rolling and generally giving the impression that she’d missed the place as much as Nynaeve had. She smiles, her face protesting a little; from the increasing cold or disuse she doesn’t know. 

 

She notes that the flag is up on the mailbox, but she’s not going to worry about that, right now, not going to worry about anything. She’s going to go inside, she’s going to drop her stuff down, she’s going to make the bed, and she’s going to sleep in it. 

 

“As I will, so mote it be,” Nynaeve nods firmly, and starts towards the door.

 

~~~

 

Before it gets completely dark, she rouses herself enough to go out to a small grocery store off the highway and pick up enough food to last her through the week. After looking at what Cadsuane had given her, and thinking of her schedule, she’d realized that through some weird twist of luck she had a good six days free, if she didn’t mind coming back to the city on the night before her shift. For some odd reason, for all that she’d stressed the importance of having an apartment close to the hospital, she doesn’t mind the idea at all.

 

Back at the house, she puts everything away, holding back only the ingredients necessary for her mother’s curry. It’s straight up comfort food, and making it is almost second nature. There’s a radio on the counter, something that had been there the last time she was there, and it’s set to a local classic rock station. 

 

Nynaeve turns it on, and then she’s singing along to Journey and dancing in the restrained way of those tethered to one place, and for the first time in a long while she’s something close to happy.

 

~~~

 

In the morning, she goes out to the mailbox, and blinks blearily at the single envelope before dragging it and herself back inside. She sits down with it after she grinds the beans for her coffee and turns on the coffeemaker. It’s addressed to her, which is a mild shock, ‘Nynaeve al’Maera’ scrawled across the front in spiky capitals that somehow manage to avoid looking cramped. She pulls it out, and reads it through, eyebrows drawing closer and closer to the center of her forehead.

 

~~~

 

[contents of one LETTER written on 06 NOVEMBER 1998]

 

I got your letter. 

 

Is it supposed to be some sort of joke? Because, honestly, if it is, I don’t really understand the point of it. 

 

There was no previous tenant. I’m the first person to live here since the late eighties. 

 

At first I thought, hell, maybe you have the wrong place, but how did you know about the paw prints?

 

[a blot of INK, as if the WRITER wanted to say MORE, but THOUGHT BETTER of it]

 

Lan

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

“What the hell,” she says when she’s finished, her voice echoing a bit. The dog looks up at her from where she’s sitting beside the table, whining a bit. “Yeah, me too,” Nynaeve mutters, and then goes digging in her purse for one of the pens she’s picked up from the hospital.

 

She feels petty as hell, and stupid to boot, writing to someone who is clearly either deluded or has a very strange sense of humour, but she writes never the less. She doesn’t bother getting a new sheet of paper, simply flips the letter from Lan-- “Whoever the hell he is” --over and writes on the back.

 

When she goes back out later to get more gas for the car, she shoves the letter back into the mailbox with a little more force than absolutely necessary.

 

~~~

 

He gets up late because hell, it’s Saturday, and he’s working at a school, and it’s essentially thrown him back to the adolescent way of treating things like weekends and holidays. The dog hasn’t left, just made herself at home over the same radiator vent, so he gets to dance around her as he makes his breakfast (can it be considered breakfast if he’s eating it at two in the afternoon? he decides he doesn’t care). 

 

When he takes a look out the window, he can just see the edge of something red peeking over the long reeds that line the drive. After his food is finished, and the dog has eaten approximately one-fourth of it, he sets out in sweatpants and a Northwestern t-shirt that’s been through the wash far too many times. He’s cold up top, relatively comfortable on the bottom, and wondering for the thousandth time why in hell he decided that living on the lake during the winter was the best idea in the fucking world.

 

“Probably because it was fucking August,” he mutters as he yanks the flag down, “and you wanted to do something other than drown in your own sweat. Now you’ll just freeze.” Lan pulls out the single letter that’s inside, and slams the door.

 

It’s his, he notes as he walks back to the house, with the name on the front scratched out and his written above and slightly to the left of it. He opens it in the kitchen, stares for a few seconds at his own words, then flips it over.

 

~~~

 

[contents of one LETTER written 07 NOVEMBER 2000]

 

Lan,

 

I’m not sure who’s playing the joke here, me or you. 

 

I know about the paw prints because, as I said, I lived here. It’s not hard to miss them, and I’m not blind.

 

Nynaeve

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

Lan rolls his eyes.

 

“This is getting ridiculous,” he says to the world at large, which currently includes him and the dog. He gets up and rips off another sheet of note paper, scrawls a quick response on it, folds it up haphazardly, and stuffs it into the now highly abused looking envelope.

 

~~~

 

When she gets back from the gas station, the flag is up again. 

 

“That was fast,” she says, slightly recalibrating her opinion of the US Postal Service and their ability to deliver mail to backwaters on a weekend. Still complete disdain for their ability to forward her mail to the city from said backwater, but she had to give credit where credit was due. And only where it was due.

 

Nynaeve opens the mailbox to find the same envelope she’d put inside it earlier, except now it wasn’t closed, and a piece of lined yellow paper was sticking up over the flap.

 

~~~

 

[contents of one LETTER written on 07 NOVEMBER 1998]

 

Honestly asking myself why I keep responding to these, seeing as you can’t even get the damn date right.

 

Speaking of, the address you left me? I drive by it every day on the way to work; it’s a ten foot hole in the ground with some wires sticking out of it. Sure you want me to send your mail there?

 

-L.

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

Nynaeve’s teeth grit, and she can feel her free hand creeping upwards, seeking her braid.

 

She stalks back to her car, pulls a pen from the glove compartment, and writes quickly below the first note, not bothering to flip it over. The paper gets even more manhandled as she shoves it back into the battered envelope, and then as both are slammed back into the mailbox.

 

~~~

 

As he’s walking away from the mailbox, he hears a screech of metal on metal, and turns around in time to see the flag raise seemingly by itself to stand tall and red against the relatively clear sky. Lan stands there a moment, not really sure what to do or what to think, then slowly makes his way back to the mailbox. 

 

He’s relatively certain it won’t do anything majorly dangerous, like blow up in his face (he’s been using it for months, you’d think it would have done something like that by now), but he’s still cautious as he puts the flag down and opens it. His letter is there, but it’s folded differently, and the envelope has developed a rip on the top flap that wasn’t there before. He pulls it out, and starts to read.

 

~~~

 

[contents of one LETTER written on 07 NOVEMBER 2000]

 

I have the date right, you cretin, it’s 2000. I watched the ball drop and everything. What year do you think it is?

And I know that where I live isn’t the Ritz, but it’s certainly not a mud pit.

 

-N.

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

Lan was insane.

 

Completely batshit.

 

There was no other explanation for why he was jogging back to the house with the intention of getting an unused notepad and a pen so he could continue exchanging notes with his mailbox. Because, as far as he could tell, especially with that last note, no actual postman had been down this way since his parents were alive. So it couldn’t be an actual person that he was arguing with, it was a box made of painted tin.

 

And yet still he jogged.

 

~~~

 

Nynaeve was inside the house, still breathing heavily in the weird sort of anger that had overtaken her as she wrote the letter. Somewhere between taking her coat off and making a cup of tea, she’d decided to take a walk up to the small ice cream parlor that was about a half-mile down the road. She needed something to do with all the energy she’d generated through her mad, and besides, if she had to walk to get her dessert, then she wouldn’t be up snacking on it at midnight in the wallow of ‘what if’s she was trying to pretend weren’t actually there.

 

She finished the tea, clunked the mug onto the counter, grabbed her coat and checkbook, and went out the door. The dog stayed behind; she was sprawled out on the radiator vent in the kitchen and Nynaeve didn’t have the heart to wake her up to go out into the cold. Everything was on track, her hands and braid swinging in purposeful motion when her ears catch a small squeak. 

 

She turns, thinking that the dog must have gotten out, must have followed her somehow, but no, it’s just the mailbox flag moving on its own. Nynaeve allows herself a small screech, which has the benefit of scaring away the small flock of birds roosting in one of the trees that line the road and leaving her alone to her very small freak out. 

 

What feels like five minutes later, but is probably closer to thirty seconds, she’s back up the ten feet that separate her from the mailbox, a construction she’s now very certain is from the devil, or at least one of the several multi-armed deities that her mother had in niches around the house, looking over disapprovingly at the actions of the al’Meara’s. 

 

Opening the mailbox takes a couple tries, as her hands are shaking in ways that they never did while she was operating on someone, and her frustration with that particular turn of events is expressed with several words that would have caused her mother’s statues to glare harder. There’s a piece of yellow paper in there, the envelope is gone, and Nynaeve’s tempted to pinch herself because this cannot be possible.

 

~~~  
[contents of one LETTER written on 07 NOVEMBER 1998]

 

You’re fucking with me. 

 

Or you’re a ghost and you’re severely deluded. 

 

Either way, it’s 1998. Accept it, and move on.

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

Ice cream is forgotten as Nynaeve stomps back to the house, mind on the book she’d brought with her as a bit of light reading, some mindless romance that Elayne had shoved at her as she left the hospital earlier in the week. It was laying on the counter, buried under the pile of mail she’d found on the doorstep and the receipts from her quick trip to the grocery store. She pulls it open, flips to the front page, smiles grimly, picks it up, and walks back outside.

 

The letter is still where she left it, flapping weakly from where it’s wedged between the flag and the body of the mailbox. Nynaeve yanks the pen out of her checkbook, scribbles quickly, tucks the paper into the cover of the book, and slams the whole grouping into the mailbox, breathing heavily from the whole ordeal, only belatedly raising the flag thirty seconds later.

 

~~~

 

Lan’s leaning against the post of the mailbox, having devoted himself to this fuckery by now, so when the flag slams into uprightness with something he’d describe as ‘temper’ if he weren’t talking about a fucking mailbox, he’s ready for it. He opens it from the ground (he’s tall, he’s got long arms, he can be lazy if he wants), and gropes around. He grunts in surprise when his fingers hit hardness, and he pulls out a box.

 

“Nora Roberts?” he scoffs as he gets a good look at it, but there’s his paper sticking out of the side, so he opens it, preconceived notions aside.

 

~~~

 

[contents of a LETTER written on 07 NOVEMBER 2000]

 

I’m not fucking with you. 

 

I wish I were, because then I could jump out of whatever bush you seem to think I’m hiding behind and beat you over the head with my purse, because clearly you need some sense knocked into you.

 

Look at the copyright page.

 

[break in READING]

 

~~~

 

Lan opens the book, unable to keep in a derisive snort at the quick glimpse he gets of the summary on the front flap, and flips to the copyright page.

 

~~~

 

[EXCERPT from the COPYRIGHT PAGE of CAROLINA MOON by NORA ROBERTS]

 

PRINTING HISTORY  
Penguin Putnam Inc. / March 2000

 

Copyright © 2000 by Nora Roberts

 

[end EXCERPT]

 

~~~

 

Lan blinks in disbelief, trying to convince himself that it’s a misprint, a severe misprint wherein any and all relevant dates are somehow shifted two years forward so an unknown woman can fuck with his head.

 

The actual reality of the situation is shaping up to sound more plausible.

 

~~~

 

[resume READING]

 

If you still refuse to believe me (and you seem like the sort of stubborn asshole who would), the only thing I can tell you is this: 

 

Watch the news tonight. Tom Brokaw is about to inform you, very seriously, that Furbies are the must have toy of this holiday season. 

 

I hope to god you don’t know anyone under the age of thirteen.

 

-N.

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

“What in hell,” Lan says, knocking his head against the pole, both book and letter forgotten as he looks up into the clear November sky.

 

~~~

 

Chapter Four: November to January (1998-1999/2000-2001)

 

~  
“She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: You are either born knowing how, or you never know.”  
― Gabriel Garcí¬a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera  
~  
After she sends the book, there’s nothing.

 

In fact, there’s a good month of nothing. She goes back to work, gets back into the swing of things, and leaves the house by the wayside. Elayne and Egwene introduce her to their families, down from Michigan and Montana respectively for Thanksgiving, and she makes the two hour drive up to Emondsfeld to see her family.

 

Her mom’s happy and bustling, and Nynaeve can honestly say that she’s never seen Anantha al’Meara as anything but. She sits Nynaeve down on the Friday after, pours them both a glass of wine, and looks her in the eye.

 

“What is wrong,” she asks bluntly, hands folded in front of her, back ramrod straight as it always was.

 

“Mom,” Nynaeve starts, but Anantha cuts her off.

 

“Don’t ‘mom’ me. I saw your face when you came in, when you thought no one was looking. Your dad, he doesn’t say anything because that is not his way. Me? This is my way,” she picks up her glass and swirls it, before repeating, “What is wrong?”

 

Nynaeve sighs, and tells her. She tells her about the stress of the hours, and the smallness of the apartment, and the claustrophobia of the city. She tells her of the man she could not save, and the guilt she can’t get rid of. She almost, almost tells her about the mailbox, and the letters, and the man who might be from the past, but she can’t quite get it out, can’t quite believe it’s real, not yet.

 

She tells her mother all of this, in the kitchen of the house where she grew up, and she cries into the golden light of a November afternoon, and she feels better than she has in months, since she moved away from Emondsfeld and her family and plunged headfirst into a city and a lifestyle and a job that is so far from what she had before and still isn’t quite what she wants. 

 

She cries, and her mother talks, and soothes, and the day goes on.

 

~~~

 

In December, her mother and her father go to Pakistan to see their extended families, and Nynaeve is tethered to the hospital.

 

Because she’s new, she’s got shifts on both Christmas and New Years, but she wrangles and finagles, and manages to get herself the first few weeks of January free. She visits the house a couple times before then, checking the ever recalcitrant mailbox, since the US Postal Service seems to refuse to recognize the fact that it isn’t her mailbox anymore. She only puts one thing in it herself, a note telling the man on the other side of this ridiculous situation that he needs to man the fuck up, and that there’s a blizzard coming after New Year’s and he’d better stock up or move out.

 

Christmas is hell, a whirl of snow and wind and freezing cold that’s accentuated by the fact that everyone and their mother is out going to visit someone else and no one is sensibly at home, which means a good portion of them are bleeding out in her ER. The rush of pain and misery and untimely loss runs up the the New Year, and she’s run ragged every time she’s on shift. 

 

Nynaeve loses another patient, a fifteen year old girl who’d slipped on a patch of ice at her grandmother’s and slammed her head on the ground after bumping it down a steep flight of concrete stairs. The whole family is around her, sobbing and wan faced, and she feels like breaking down herself, even though she knows the girl never had a chance. 

 

She’s glad when she can leave, an ugly feeling that twists her up; she’s only glad because she couldn’t stand looking into the hollow eyes of the grandmother anymore, listening to the silent litany that was going through the old woman’s mind about how she should have never made them visit her, that driving forty-five minutes out wasn’t such a sacrifice, that this was all her fault.

 

She watches the ball drop in the break room, surrounded by four or five nurses, only three of which are actually upright. There’s a weak cheer from all of them, and then a code blue goes up, and they’re scattering, the first tragedy of the new year rolling through the doors on blood-slicked wheels.

 

~~~

 

Nynaeve and the dog are old pros at this now, moving back into the house with ease, her suitcase full of just the right amount of clothes, the required grocery run having been done on the way down, so she’s moving stuff and food at the same time, with minimal interference from the dog. It’s cold in the house, the heaters working double time to make up for the month or so that they’ve been off, but Nynaeve doesn’t mind. If she’d wanted warm, she would have gone with her parents. Cold suits her just fine. 

 

She’s there for three days, relaxing and drinking more tea then she thinks is humanly possible, before she notices the flag on the mailbox is up.

 

~~~

 

Lan thinks it’s done.

 

He didn’t have the guts to respond to that last message, his head spinning from the ramifications of the fact that his mailbox was some sort of Star Trek gadget or whatever the hell. He figures that Nynaeve--which, he should admit, he isn’t even sure how to pronounce--feels (will feel?) the same way, since there’s no influx of notes scribbled in that not-quite cursive of hers. 

 

And so it goes, with Thanksgiving and finals going by, and his students going on a mass exodus that only occasionally includes a stop by his office with a small gift. Mat Cauthon is there the day before school lets out, a hooked grin on his face. He gives Lan a sword he’d found in a shop somewhere (he refuses to specify) and the promise that he’ll continue to be Lan’s TA even if he isn’t in his class anymore.

 

During the break he’s at the house full time, not going into the city at all, no matter how much Siuan tells him to get his ass into the city. She says she’s not dragging herself out to the boonies just to tell him something he should have learned six months ago, and Lan takes note of that, he really does. 

 

To the point that when the note comes a week before Christmas that there’s going to be a blizzard after the New Year, even though the weathermen are only predicting a light snowfall, Lan stocks up on food and blankets, the dog (which he’d finally named Imani, after his grandmother) following him around, her coat the thick mat of winter fur.

 

Christmas is dull; just him and the phone lying off the hook, the dial tone a low buzzing accompaniment to his day. Imani’s on the radiator vent, and Lan’s sitting cross-legged next to her, reading the book Nynaeve had sent him. He’d searched for it, of course, just to make sure, and although he could find a veritable deluge of Nora Roberts’ books at both the library and the bookstore, the copy he had in his hands seemed to be the only incidence of a Carolina Moon in existence. For now, at least.

 

It wasn’t exciting reading, wasn’t even gripping, but it was something to do.

 

New Years passes in much the same way, except instead of being bored by a sappy, overly cliched romance novel, he’s being bored by a sappy, overly cliched movie. He doesn’t want to turn to the New Years celebration, though that’s taken over every one of the major networks, because he’s alone, he knows it, and he doesn’t want to be reminded by the thousands of people in Times Square who’re there just to affirm the fact that they do, in fact, have someone to kiss when that ball drops.

 

He checks his watch just as the credits roll, and it’s 12:08 AM on January 1st.

 

The first hour of 1999, and Lan’s already ready for the millenium to be over.

 

~~~

 

The blizzard hits on the second, just like Nynaeve’s note said it would, and he spends most of the day watching the snow slowly pile up, burying him out in the back of beyond. He finally puts the phone back on the cradle, because now, no matter how much Siuan bitches, he physically can’t make it to the city, can’t make it anywhere.

 

Thank God the generator’s under the house, he thinks, and then wanders back to the very intense game of solitaire he’d abandoned in favor of watching the snow come down.

 

On the third, it’s still snowing, and Lan only goes outside to shove the currently accumulated snow off the dock and into the lake. He’s not going to bother with the path up to the road, not until this shit stops for good. The quiet gives him time to think, to reflect, to realize that even though he still doesn’t want to talk to Siuan for a very long time, he’s at least over Moiraine’s death. He’s done with bodyguard gigs though, that’s a definite, and he’s already made plans with Bashere to stay on at the University indefinitely. 

 

Who the hell knows, he might even make tenure.

 

He tells Siuan this when she calls on the fourth, and spends a great deal of time ignoring her ranting while watching the snow continue to fall outside his fragile cocoon of glass and wood and metal. 

 

“You done?” He asks, when she finally seems to have slowed down.

 

“No,” she grouches, and he can hear papers shuffling in the background. “But I know how hard headed you are, and at this point the shouting is purely for my own benefit.” He grins. Siuan may be a harridan at times, but at least she knows it.

 

“How’s Gareth?” He says, nudging Imani with his foot, causing her to roll over so he could rub her stomach, all without cracking an eyelid.

 

“He’s fine,” Siuan says, her voice still irritated. “Bloody man is smiling at me right now, like he knew this was going to happen. Did you tell him?”

 

“No,” Lan says, pulling the word out. “But I might have mentioned it to Leane.”

 

“And of course she’s got to tell him, and neither of them think to tell me,” Siuan says in disgust, but Lan can tell that she’s shifted from mad and irritated to just her natural state of irritated. “How’re you holding up?”

 

“I’m fine,” he replies, “Got lots of food, the electrictricity hasn’t cut out, the dog doesn’t want to kill me yet.”

 

“Not what I meant.”

 

“But it’s what I said.”

 

Siuan sighs, and he can hear her exasperation over the line. “Be safe, Lan,” she finally says. “She might be dead, but it doesn’t mean you have to be as well.”

 

“I think I’ve finally figured that out,” he says, then hangs up.

 

She doesn’t call back. He counts that as a win.

 

~~~

 

On the fifth, when the skies finally clear and he’s able to carve a path through the nearly two feet of powder to a road he knows isn’t going to be plowed until several days from now. But it’s the principle of the thing that matters, so he digs. After he’s got a path, he unearths his truck, and finishes knocking the last of the snow from the deck and dock. Imani’s bounding through the drifts, her coat frosted with white, tail waving in the freezing air. Both of them are puffing out white clouds, and Lan’s half certain that he’s steaming in places.

 

When he reaches the mailbox, he considers it for a moment, then turns back to the the house, eyes squinting against the sun that’s not quite at the low noon height it manages in winter. He sits at the table in the kitchen, a pad of paper in front of him, and proceeds to write the longest letter he'd written in years, easily equal to the weekly notes he sent home to his family, a counterpoint to the the phone calls he managed on a much less regular basis.

 

Once it’s finished, he tramps back outside, breath thick on the air, and puts it in the mailbox, his fingers nearly numb by the time he pulls up the red flag and walks back to the house.

 

~~~

 

Chapter Five: Consisting of Letters Exchanged from January to March (1999/2001)

 

~  
“But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.”  
― Gabriel Garcí¬a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera  
~  
[contents of one LETTER written 05 JANUARY 1999]

 

Nynaeve,

 

Thanks for the heads up. I seriously think that I might have died, or at least been reduced to snacking on the dog’s food. Not a great way to spend the first couple days of the new year. It’s beautiful out here right now, but cold as all hell, and the trek out to the mailbox is going to be hell, but I’m going to do it.

 

Really, though. I’m not going to ask how this is possible, because that’s what I did for the last two months, and all I got was a headache and the unending ire of the University’s head librarian. 

 

But. I would like to know more about you. I had a thought that maybe it’s not the house, or the damn mailbox at all. Maybe it’s us. Or maybe I’m just curious about the person behind the handwriting. Whatever. I’ll start.

 

My name is al’Lan Mandragoran, and my parents were both gracious and cruel for gifting me with that particular monstrosity of a name. Gracious because ‘Lan’ is a perfectly decent shortening, monstrous because no one can say ‘Mandragoran’ unless they’re from the particular corner of Georgia my grandparents immigrated from, and even then they stumble over the Americanization. 

 

I’m a professor of military history over at Northwestern, and before that I was a bodyguard for several years. It didn’t work out, and I have friends who have friends, so.

 

Your turn,

 

Lan

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

[contents of one LETTER written on 06 JANUARY 2001]

 

Lan,

 

Long time, no words. 

 

Congratulations on the effort my friend, and here’s hoping you didn’t freeze to death on the way back. I’m two years too far away to help you with that.

 

So, turnabout being fair play and all that. My name is Nynaeve al’Meara, as you already know, and my mother is from India and my father, Pakistan. They had a very tumultuous relationship, from meeting at Oxford, and my mother following my father back to Pakistan to fight my grandmother for the right to marry him (you think I’m joking and by god, I wish I were). ‘Nynaeve’ is a combination of ‘Nyna’ (which was my father’s creative contribution to the naming process) and ‘Naeve’ (which my mother had heard while at college and fell in love with). 

 

I’m a surgical resident at the hospital attached to Northwestern, and before that I was a med student over in Wisconsin. Still am, for you. Damn, that’s an odd thought. Though this whole situation is weird. No idea why I’m getting hung up on that, but there we are.

 

I didn’t have time to think about how this all works (surgical resident, you did catch that right?) and the most I can say is: thank God it’s just the mailbox. Can you imagine if it was something bigger? The ramifications for the space-time continuum and all that jazz.

 

Nynaeve

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

[contents of one LETTER written on 08 JANUARY 1999]

 

Nynaeve,

 

I didn’t freeze to death, but it is cold as balls outside, so I made the executive decision that avoiding frostbite was preferable to furthered communications with the future.

 

Now that we know each other better (read: we know each other’s names and current (past? future?) jobs, I’m not really sure what to ask, what to say. Like, that’s all the first date bullshit out the window in a few lines of writing. What else is there to say?  
And while I don’t think we have to worry about space-time, or anything that drastic, I don’t think we should mention major events to each other, okay? Strictly personal. Which is going to be hell on my wallet (can you imagine the money I’d score if you told me the stats for the Red Sox for the next two years?), but I’ll persevere.

 

How about...what do you like? Like a quick list of five things or whatever, just off the top of your head.

 

C’mon, I’ve got nothing but myself, basic TV and Imani to keep me company.

 

Lan

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

[contents of one LETTER written on 09 JANUARY 2001]

 

Lan,

 

I’m glad to hear you’re alive, I was going to start digging around the mailbox, just to make sure that you hadn’t been buried back there. Don’t laugh, alright, there’s a lot of dirt back there, it’s not an impossible suggestion.

 

I’m glad you’re confident about the space-time thing, though luckily not much life-changing has happened--Wait, I take that back. Things have happened, big things, little things, horrible things. Things that shouldn’t have happened, that should’ve, needed to happen, both for good or ill. 

 

I’m almost glad that it’s just pen and paper here, because if you were in front of me, if it were something else, I might blurt out something that I really shouldn’t have. It won’t be hard to stick to just me, and my own life, but honestly, you have nothing to worry about. Unfortunately (fortunately?), everything you’re about to experience has already happened for me, so.

 

Um, five things I like? I like my job, my family, fantasy books, my friends, the color yellow. Oh, and the dog. I like the dog.

 

Nynaeve

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

[contents of one LETTER written on 10 JANUARY 1999]

 

Nynaeve,

 

I’m glad you’re glad. Also that you didn’t decide to go digging around the mailbox, as I’m pretty certain that’s where my father ran the electrical wiring, and the last thing I’d want would be for you to be powerless, or worse, electrocuted in January. Which brings me to another point: Why are you living in my parents’ house?

 

Damn, I never thought of it like that. That’s...a lot of inadvertent responsibility that I’m suddenly glad that I don’t have. Bad enough to be responsible for one person’s life (which you do understand, right? or did I totally misunderstand the concept of ‘surgical resident’?), but to be responsible for holding back hints of the future...that’s a heavy load.

 

Right, five things. I like my job (now), my friends, National Geographic, long walks on the beach with Imani, mindless action films.

 

Lan

 

P.S. I’ve been meaning to ask: why do you just call it ‘the dog’?  
[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

[contents of a LETTER written on 11 JANUARY 2001]

 

Lan,

 

It’s your parent’s house? The realtor never mentioned the previous owners, so I would have never made that connection. And I’m here because I needed a place to stay while apartment hunting, and this place is far enough away from the city to be cheap, and for some reason, not many people want to stay here (can’t imagine why, the all glass walls and precarious position aren’t off putting at all).

 

Wow, you just made me into the savior of all time and space or something, just because I can manage to avoid mentioning who won the World Series the year. Important, in a rather stupid and trivial sort of way. 

 

Trust me, though, the load isn’t that heavy, especially since I can’t help but think that even if you did know these things, the only effect it would have would be to cause you grief, as several government agencies would be very interested in finding out how you know these things, and suddenly boom! you’re in an episode of The X-Files and can’t escape.

 

(I minored in drama can you tell?)

 

Why do I only call the dog ‘the dog’? Because she’s not my dog. She came with the house, collar and all, but no name.

 

Nynaeve

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

[contents of a LETTER written on 12 JANUARY 1999]

 

Nynaeve,

 

Yes, it’s theirs. My father built it for my mother, because she missed the sea, and he wanted to give her something lasting. The tree was his own madness, however, I have no idea how he got that idea. And don’t disparage the house’s honor, it might drop you into the lake and then where will you be?

 

Seems we both have a talent for far reaching melodrama. I fully intend to blame my TA for that, he has a habit of muttering to himself about the worst possible outcome for everything, even though he’s got the highest grade in most of his classes, so far as I can tell.

 

If the dog came with the house...is she grey and black, with a plumed tail and questionable heritage? Because that might be Imani.

 

Lan

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

[contents of a LETTER written on 13 JANUARY 2001]

 

Lan,

 

We were out on the beach today, the dog and I, and I called her ‘Imani’ on a hunch. I think that’s the fastest I’ve ever seen her ears go up, or her tail wag. She was practically vibrating, Lan, to the point that she bowled me over, skidded a few feet, and then looked around, as though searching for someone else. 

 

Your dog misses you Lan, where the hell did you go without her.

 

Anyway, this was written in haste early this morning because (and this may come as a shock) I do have a job, one that I’ve got to get back to (I have an overnight shift tonight). ‘Sporadicness’ is going to be the name of my game, or maybe it’s going to be ‘ridiculously long tracts’ who knows, I haven’t decided.

 

Nynaeve

 

P.S. Note the scarf. It’s going to be cold as hell for the next few months, wouldn’t want you to get snot all over your professorial tweed.

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

[EXCERPTS from the contents of a LETTER written from 14 JANUARY 1999 to 26 JANUARY 1999]

 

Nynaeve,

 

So I started this before I realized that you would be gone, and then I found I couldn’t stop. 

 

Somehow, in a weird way, talking to you is better than moodily staring out at Lake Michigan and counting how many birds try to dive bomb the ice before remembering that, unlike water, it doesn’t give way to a beak slamming into it at fifty miles per hour. It took them awhile to figure that one out, and I’ve got a few birds lying on the ice near the house, their necks broken and their bodies slowly sinking and then freezing into the ice on the surface. It’s gruesome, and a bit too reminiscent of Tess of the d’Urbervilles for my taste, but such is the way things are [...]

 

Went into the University today, and got approached by one of the live-in students. Apparently, she saw me carrying the sword that my TA gave me for Christmas, and she wanted to know if I could actually use it. I said yes (I did medieval reenactments in college), and she then launched in the the most detailed and well prepared speech as to why I should consider sponsoring and coaching the fencing club. I think it lasted a good fifteen minutes (and might have gone on longer) before I held my hand up and half-shouted a second yes over the tide. 

 

She grinned like I had just given her the sun (I might have, the pointy steel equivalent, that is), and ran off, shouting at me to be in the PoliSci building at eight tomorrow. I don’t think I ever got her name [...]

 

So one of those ‘horrible, no good, very bad events’ happened today. A good minute spent gaping at the television, and then very seriously reconsidering my decision to live on a house supported by several wooden sticks, before I regained my sanity and remembered that there are no earthquakes in Illinois. Still, a very stressful ninety seconds or so, followed by a crushing weight of sympathy [...]

 

She died, you know. That’s why it didn’t work out.

 

Can’t be a bodyguard if the body you’re supposed to be guarding is dead.

 

Lan

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

[EXCERPTS from the contents of a LETTER written from 27 JANUARY 2001 to 13 FEBRUARY 2001]

 

Lan

 

Your students are odd, you know that? I came out to get something from the grocery store here, swung by the house, saw the flag up, and picked up your last letter. Apparently no one else has rented the damn house (again), and sometimes I think I’m making the realtor’s commission by taking it out myself every few months (my savings, by the way, are feeling this, and they don’t like it).

 

But damn, man, I know I said endless tracts, but five pages? My boss (Cadsuane, the living embodiment of medical related Terror) is starting to look at me funny because I spend half of my time in the break room going over your letters (your handwriting is atrocious, you know that?).

 

And--she died. That’s a lot blunter--a lot harsher than I would have guessed. Your reason for quitting, I mean. And I suppose you blame yourself for it, because you seem like that kind of man. (I’m that kind of woman, you know; Only lost two but I can’t--quite--forget them.) Is that why you’re staring moodily out at a lake in your dead parent’s house? Because you feel sorry for yourself, for her?

 

Brooding isn’t going to bring her back, and it’ll just end up burying you with her (unless you want that; do you want that) [...]

 

I’ve been working non-stop for the past week. I’ve had back to back overnights, and somehow it’s always on nights where we’re on overload (what is it with February and winter that coincides with the desire to go out and do something stupid and most likely fatal?), so I end up staying four, five hours past my time, and then crashing in the break room for three hours and then I’ve got maybe five hours to myself before I’m back in the fray again.

 

I love my job, don’t get me wrong, but I’m wearing down, and there’s nothing here to wind me back up. [...]

 

Elayne dragged me to a bar on the other side of town yesterday, told me I needed to (and I quote) ‘get the fuck out of the North Side’, and then said something disparaging about my hair that distracted me enough for her to push me into her car and lock the door. It was...fun, I think? It was a jazz sort of place, one of those old holdouts that trades on being old enough to remember Al Capone, and the music wasn’t too loud and the booze was good and the food was even halfway decent. [...]

 

Mom and Dad came back from Pakistan yesterday, baked into mahogany versions of themselves and smelling like sweat and dust. I picked them up at the airport, and my mother, god love her, she gave me this look like she knows something is going on (and she always knows when something’s going on), and I nearly dragged out all of your letters and showed them to her and started babbling about the man who was writing me from the past. It was a near thing (stop laughing, alright, my mom is scary) [...]

 

Nynaeve

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

[a QUICK NOTE found on top of a PACKAGE wrapped in BROWN PAPER by NYNAEVE as she drops off her LETTER, written on 14 FEBRUARY 1999]

 

Nynaeve,

 

I don’t think you’re dating anyone right now (if you are this just got a thousand times more awkward), and don’t even get me started on the relative definition of ‘now’. 

 

But. 

 

It’s Valentine’s Day, and if I’ve done my calculations even slightly correctly (and I say ‘my calculations’, I really mean I made my TA count days while he printed off this week’s assignment), it’s a Wednesday for you (it’s odd, you know, not even the days of the week are the same for us).

 

So. Wednesday. Valentine’s Day.

 

You don’t have to do this today (though it would be, uh, cool if you did?), but here. Inside this package (bundle? gift?) is everything you need. Find a free hour, take the El over to the University, and open it.

 

Have a drink on me when you’re done

 

[inside the PACKAGE are as follows: one TWENTY DOLLAR BILL for the aforementioned drink, a list of ADDRESSES that lead to various spots around the area, seemingly unimportant, but with NOTES next to them saying things like: ‘There’s a quote here. Not sure if it still is, seeing as it’s graffiti, but it’s here for me, and that’s what matters. The place, not what (or who) might be there. Anyway, the quote. Read it. The place. Appreciate it.’]

 

[end NOTE]

 

~~~

 

[EXCERPTS from the contents of a LETTER written from 15 FEBRUARY 1999 to 01 MARCH 1999]

 

Nynaeve,

 

Harsh. 

 

Very harsh.

 

So harsh that I admit that I wrote your name on Monday and then sat and did nothing (I was not brooding you can stop right now) until Friday.

 

I’ll admit (reluctantly, and under duress, and only because I’m writing it down) that after she died, I wasn’t too interested in continuing to live myself. Luckily (or unluckily, depending on how you look at it), my boss doesn’t know how to leave well enough alone. She essentially badgered me into getting off my ass, literally drove me down to this house to get away from her. [...]

 

Did you get my package (I know you got it, got the papers, that’s a dumb question), but did you get the experience? I sort of want to know if things were missing, so I can go out and somehow preserve them, but I don’t-- [several scratched out lines]--fuck it all, this is hard. [...]

 

The University is in full swing again, which means classes (and though I still can’t believe it), the fencing club. That first meeting was...indescribably, to be honest. The girl who approached me, Avi, was hanging around the door to the PoliSci building, like she didn’t believe I’d come. Went down to the basement with her to find my own TA (the traitor), and about ten others [...]

 

I just had a thought, though, as ridiculous and superficial as it might be. It’s been six months since this whole thing started (give or take a few weeks, maybe), and I don’t even know what you look like [...]

 

Lan

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

Chapter Six: March to August (1999/2001)

 

~  
“He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”  
― Gabriel Garcí¬a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera  
~

 

She’s nervous, she’ll admit that, after she sent the last letter. Chewing someone out like that, especially someone she doesn’t really know, isn’t something she does on a regular basis, and honestly isn’t something that she’d like to be done to her. But for some reason, whatever that reason might be (she has no idea and no desire to look further into it), she couldn’t scrap that section, couldn’t avoid making a point, as blunt and callous as it may have seemed.

 

Nynaeve’s solidly back in rotation now, able to visit the house (and it’s accompanying mailbox, which, she’ll admit, is now half the allure) once every two or three weeks. Luckily, it seems that Lan, on his past and distant schedule, is having the same sort of fight to balance work and...whatever it is that they have going. 

 

Elayne catches her reading his latest letters more often than not, but she’s polite enough not to directly ask her about them, even if Nynaeve can tell that she’s skirting around the issue to the best of her ability. Egwene isn’t nearly so subtle, asking her straight who they’re from on one day, and then hounding her for details every day after that. She finally cracks slightly and says she’s doing one of those long distance pen pal things with a friend of her mother’s from Pakistan, and Egwene backs off (if only in the fact that she stops asking when she’s going to meet ‘the guy’, as Nynaeve had hinted heavily that he was much older).

 

It’s in March that Lan mentions that he hasn’t actually ever seen her, and she doesn’t know what to do about it. She doesn’t want to send him a picture, because that’s somehow ridiculous, and she can’t remember what sort of video cameras they have in 1999 because she was too busy cramming for med-- 

 

“Wait a minute,” she says out loud, causing Imani to perk up her ears. “March of ninety-nine. The surgeon’s conference.” There’s a brief period of personal upheaval where Nynaeve realizes how much stuff she has and how little of it is in the correct place, but she finally pulls out a date planner from two years ago, and flips it open to the relevant week. The squares are crammed with notes on assignments, study sessions, and intern hours, but there, on the thirteenth and fourteenth of March is a relatively blank space that only says ‘Conference. Train station: 10:45 AM.’

 

It’s the work of minutes to scrawl out a letter, and then two days later she’s in the car, Imani beside her, blasting Foreigner from the radio as they ride out of the city to handle a bit of postal business.

 

~~~

 

When Lan gets home on March twelfth he’s looking for a little peace, a little relaxation, maybe even a warm breeze from the south to break the lingering grasp of winter. He gets none of that. The flag’s up when he pulls in, and the letter in the mailbox is shorter than he’s grown used to, closer to the three line notes they exchanged at the beginning of this seemingly nonsensical relationship.

 

~~~

 

[contents of a LETTER written on 12 MARCH 2001]

 

Lan,

 

Tomorrow, your time, I’m coming in on the 10:45 AM train from Madison for a surgical conference. I left something on the platform there, got too caught up in the fact that I was in Chicago (my first big city, didn’t you know?) and that I was about to be late. Don’t worry, it’s not anything huge, though that’s the only hint I’m going to give you. You wanted to see me? Here’s your chance.

 

Nynaeve

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

13th March, 1999

 

Lan feels like an idiot. 

 

He’d say as much, but he’s a six and a half foot man lurking in a train station, he doesn’t need another reason for people to stare at him. He also is an idiot, because he has no idea what Nynaeve looks like, beyond the fact that her parents are from India and Pakistan, and that she’s going to be getting off the train that’s going to arrive--he checks his watch--about two minutes from now.

 

When it does arrive, with a rush of wind and the pneumatic hiss of brakes, he pushes off the wall and manages to walk a good two feet before he’s completely engulfed by a rush of humanity. He manages to keep his head from turning like an owl’s, though he’s marginally afraid that she was further up from where he’s standing, and that he’s completely missed her already.

 

He steadies himself with the fact that if she was about to be late to her conference, then she’s probably going to be one of the last to leave. He’s rewarded when a male voice from behind him shouts, “Nynaeve,” and he half-turns to see a lanky man swoop down on the shortest woman he’s seen since Moiraine died. She’s carrying a book and an overnight bag, both of which she drops to better hang on to the man who picks her up and swings her around.

 

“You’re late,” she says crisply after the man puts her down, but Lan can see that she’s grinning.

 

“It’s the big city, Nynaeve,” the man says, “Early is a foreign concept.”

 

“You’re still a complete scoundrel, I see,” Nynaeve replies, rolling her eyes slightly.

 

“Someone’s gotta be,” the man says, checking his watch. “Shit, when did you say your conference was going to start?”

 

“Eleven fifteen.”

 

“Well, it’s ten fifty-five now, which means that we’ve got to go,” the man says, ducking down to scoop up Nynaeve’s bag, his face turning towards Lan for the first time. With a small jolt, he realizes that it’s Mat Cauthon he’s staring at, his erstwhile TA, which is all sorts of wrong and vaguely infuriating. The two of them hustle out of the station in a controlled hurry, leaving the book that Nynaeve had been holding on the ground, its first few pages flapping in the shifting air of the station.

 

Lan walks over and picks it up, his eyebrow going up slightly at the cover. It’s an old book, clearly well worn, but the title is still clear: Love In The Time Of Cholera. 

 

He stays on the platform for a very long time, just standing there, and letting the wind buffet him from either side.

 

~~~

 

Lan drives to the University at around twelve; he’s got a lesson plan to put the final touches on, and a teaching assistant to find. A few moments after he walks into the building, he realizes that he also has a fencing club meeting to preside over, one that he’d completely forgotten about, and is half-tempted to cancel so he can continue to do the shell-shocked routine in private. 

 

It’s too late to back out now, because there are twelve bored twenty-somethings (who don’t look like they’re going to go anywhere until they get to whack each other about with swords) draped all over his usual classroom, when they should be downstairs in the small theatre attached to the PoliSci building. The group includes, he’s quick to notice, one Mat Cauthon, who was busy talking to a pretty Asian girl in the back and, from the looks of it, getting repeatedly shut down (which didn’t seem to be discouraging him in the slightest).

 

She’s shorter than Nynaeve, he thinks, and that surprises him, at least the fact that he’s got enough of a visual reference to attach to the name that he can judge the appearance of others.

 

“What are you all doing here?” he asks, going over to dump his bags on the table.

 

“Got kicked out by the ROTC kids,” Avi says, spinning one of his pens through her fingers. “Apparently they’ve got a better use for the auditorium then ‘dancing around with fake swords’.”

 

“That’s a quote,” the Asian girl next to Mat says, and then at his nudge, adds, “I’m Tuon, by the way.”

 

“Nice to meet you,” Lan replies absently, still slightly distracted. A few minutes later, though, and he’s focused again, the issue of his--his what, his correspondence partner?--shoved to the back of his mind where it belongs. And it stays that way, all through several bouts with over enthusiastic students, and the half and hour or so he manages to grind out of the rest of the afternoon to fix the bits of his lesson plans that had been bothering him, dropping a few end-of-term worksheets and substituting a classwide game of Risk that he’s alternately looking forward to and dreading.

 

Mat, unfortunately, is forgotten, for the most part. Lan had gone a few rounds with him during practice, with his assistant very nearly giving him a run for his money (Lan thinks it’s his eyes, hard to be focused on avoiding getting hit by a wooden sword when the man looks like he’s about to win a pub quiz). After practice, however, he’d left with Tuon, a hand waving above his head in a dismissive flick that Lan had learned meant something along the lines of, “Toodles, mate”, complete with imaginary top hat and monocle. 

 

All of Mat’s ridiculousness culminated in the fact that Lan was completely unable to casually bring up the fact that his TA’s short friend from the train station was, in fact, the woman he’d been conversing with through a time travelling mailbox, and could he please at least talk to her before she went back to school. Part of that was because Lan couldn’t actually say that sentence out loud without laughing, but he was perfectly willing (and able) to dump the majority of the blame on Mat.

 

The end of the day comes up on him faster than he would have imagined possible. He exchanges pleasantries with Katrina, the night janitor, in the darkening lobby before walking back up the two or three flights of stairs to his his office. Lan’s focused, on both the logistics of playing Risk with forty-some kids (double that, if he takes into account his upper-level students, and he just might), and what in hell he’s gotten himself into, in regards to the situation with Nynaeve.

 

~~~

 

Of course, all of his musings, and plans, and whatever the hell else, are rendered completely useless by Nynaeve herself, but he tries not to think about that. Well, he sends her a letter, because by this point it’s habit and he feels like he has to, but that’s it. That’s the last of his time that he’s spending on the matter.

 

Seriously.

 

He’s not gonna think about it.

 

~~~

 

[contents of a LETTER written on 15 MARCH 2001]

 

Lan,

 

Did it work?

 

Nynaeve

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

[contents of a LETTER written on 15 MARCH 1999]

 

Nynaeve,

 

I think...

 

I think I kissed you last night. 

 

Two years ago. 

 

Whatever.

 

Lan

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

15th March, 2001

 

Nynaeve’s silent for a moment, staring.

 

The laughter is completely unexpected, it just creeps out in short bursts before she’s on the ground, gasping for air, the paper fluttering next to her. She remembers that night, and if Lan says he kissed her, then...

 

~~~

 

14th March, 1999

 

It’s three in the afternoon on a Sunday, and Nynaeve is bored.

 

She’s sitting in the lobby of one of Northwestern’s many buildings, her foot barely restraining itself from tapping its way to China. Normally she wouldn’t mind waiting for Mat, who’d promised to pick her up around four-thirty to take her back to his apartment to pack so she could catch the six o’clock train, except for the fact that the last panel of her conference had finished a full hour before she’d expected it to, leaving her in a bit of a lurch. 

 

It didn’t help that she seemed to have misplaced her book somewhere, and she can’t for the life of her recall where she’d had it last. When the clock hits the quarter hour after a period of time Nynaeve is relatively certain was equal to several years, she gives up. Mat knows she’s going to be in this building at four-thirty; there’s nothing stopping her from having at least a cursory look around in the--she checks the clock, resisting the urge to groan--hour and fifteen minutes she’s got free.

 

Four classrooms and an auditorium later, and she’s trudging up a flight of dim and suspiciously industrial looking stairs. They let out to a decently academic looking hallway, which looks like it’s lined with carbon copies of the classrooms she’d seen earlier. Discretion, however, isn’t something she’s currently in possession of--procrastination would be more accurate, though ungrammatical--and so each room is destined for a casual once over through the supremely useless rectangles of glass embedded in each.

 

Her plan is working out rather well--she’s gone through eight classrooms, and pegged two of them as being somehow related to mathematics while the other six remain frustratingly ambiguous--when she comes across a room that’s actually occupied. Nynaeve resists saying anything along the lines of “Jackpot”, but she does think it. Rather loudly. 

 

The door’s open as well, so it’s easy enough to lurk in a manner she’s quite happy to label as “stealthy”, even if the man in the room cops on the the fact that she’s there within thirty seconds. He turns away from what he’s fiddling with on the table that’s in the middle of a haphazard circle of desks, straightening as he does so, and Nynaeve develops a crick in her neck. 

 

Good lord the man is tall, a good four inches past six foot at least, and with the bearing to make his height imposing, instead of hulking. He’s got a nice face, she thinks a bit dazedly, as she tries to find words to explain why, exactly, she’s hovering in the doorway when she’s very clearly not a student. Not pretty, by any standards, but solid, with eyes that have suddenly gotten a lot wider.

 

“Hi,” she finally says, breaking the silence. “I’m, uh,--”

 

“I know who you are,” he says, voice slightly strangled sounding. “Mat mentioned you might be around. 

 

“Nynaeve, right?” he continues, holding his hand out. “I’m Lan.”

 

“Lan,” she repeats, coming further into the room to shake his hand, noting as she does so that he’s got a firm grip, and warm hands. “Mat mentioned me? To you?”

 

“He’s my TA,” Lan says a bit gruffly, the strangled note transferring over into pure gravel. “You’re the reason I’m here, instead of him.”

 

“Wha--Oh,” Nynaeve says, as she finally catches a clear glimpse of what’s on the table. It looks like someone has taken a blender to three boxes of Risk, with the boards nearly buried under a heaping pile of game pieces and cards. “What is that?” 

 

“Final project,” Lan says, turning back to look over the carnage with a slight squint. “I teach military history, if Mat hasn’t told you already, and I’m having my classes recreate the last three major wars.”

 

“And that’s fun?” Nynaeve asks hesitantly, not wanting to offend, but still not quite getting it.

 

Lan glances down at her and grins. “It is when they finally figure out that I’m not grading them on accuracy and start improvising.”

 

Nynaeve laughs, a quick snort of mirth that echoes in the emptiness of the room. “Do the wars ever end like they’re supposed to?”

 

“Generally not, especially if the original battle plan involves the invasion of Russia.”

 

Things devolve from there, with Nynaeve offering to help sort things out, and Lan losing the last of the gravel in his voice. Mat finds them there about an hour later, looking windswept from the outdoors, his hat still firmly on his head, and scarf wrapped tightly around his neck.

 

“So this is where you ended up,” Mat says, grinning as the two of them turn from from where they were debating the ratio of Allied and Axis forces, with Nynaeve holding her position mainly just to irritate Lan. He gets this spark in his eyes when he’s determined, somehow narrowing and widening them all at once, and every once in awhile, his hands will move in an abortive movement, trying to gesture to a chalkboard that isn’t there.

 

“Mat,” Nynaeve smiles, standing up, only slightly aware of Lan standing up beside her (okay, a lot aware, but mainly because the man looms). “You done?”

 

“More than I would have been,” Mat says, pushing off the doorjamb. “Looks like you’ve been doing my work for me.”

 

“I was bored,” she mutters, cutting a quick glance at Lan, before swinging back to Mat. “You’re lucky he was here, otherwise I’d probably be a skeleton in the lobby by now.”

 

“It’s not that dull--,” Mat starts, only to get cut off.

 

“Doesn’t help that I lost my book,” Nynaeve says, offhandedly noticing Lan’s slight jerk at her words. “An hour, Mat. An hour of industrial tiling and fluorescent lighting. I couldn’t do it. I could not do it,” she finishes, punctuated each word of the last sentence with a tug at her braid.

 

Mat holds up his hands, his eyes crinkling with suppressed laughter. “I’m here now, aren’t I?”

 

“Yes you are. And we,” she turns to Lan, holding her hand out in an echo of the gesture he’d made earlier, “have to go. It was nice to meet you.”

 

“And you as well,” Lan says, taking her hand. For a moment she thinks that’s it, is already turning back to Mat to shoo him out of the building, intending to turn right back and reclaim her hand when Lan bends down (way down), and brushes a kiss across her knuckles.

 

It’s sudden, and Nynaeve doesn’t know what to do about it. It helps that Lan looks equally shocked by his actions, staring at her hand with the sort of horror generally reserved for human bodies and live cockroaches. She doesn’t quite snatch her hand back, but it’s a near thing, and the next few minutes are a whirl of stammering and awkwardly repeated goodbyes, until she and Mat are out in the hallway and she shoves Lan--god she doesn’t even know his last name--into the back of her mind.

 

~~~

 

[contents of a LETTER written on 15 MARCH 2001]

 

Lan,

 

That was you? 

 

You’re weird hand guy?

 

Oh my god, I bitched about you to Mat all the way to the train station, class on Monday is probably going to be hell.

 

Nynaeve

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

[contents of a LETTER written on 15 MARCH 1999]

 

Nynaeve,

 

As reassuring as it is that I went down in your mind as ‘weird hand guy’ (read: not very), I still find myself wanting to apologize?

 

Perfectly decent behavior for nineteenth century Britain, more than a bit odd for the end of the twentieth century.

 

Lan

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

After that, things get more sporadic.

 

Classes end for Lan, his two o’clock nearly getting into a full out brawl over the rules of Risk, and whether or not secret missions trump the actual goal of the assignment (Lan’s forced to make a ruling: they don’t; metaphorical bloodshed ensues). Mat Cauthon stops giving him dirty looks by the end of March, but only just. 

 

Nynaeve’s pulling more shifts as doctors start taking vacation time, generally for weeks at a time. She tells him that she doesn’t mind, that she needs the money if she wants to be able to go on vacation herself, but he can tell that she’s exhausted. Her letters are shorter, choppier, the handwriting varying widely as she writes them over days instead of hours. Lan’s torn between keeping his short, to keep her from feeling obligated to reply, and keeping them long, to give her something to occupy herself in the rare moments she gets a break.

 

~~~

 

Come mid-May, Siuan and Gareth ask him if he wants to come with them down to Gareth’s hometown, a small city in Georgia close to the Alabama border, for the summer. Siuan’s schedule is whatever the hell she wants it to be, and Gareth nominally works for her, so they’re able to take that much time off. Lan being off from school is a complete coincidence, Siuan tells him, and he nods, smiles, and doesn’t believe a word of it.

 

He initially doesn’t want to, prepares himself to say “sorry, but no”, but Leane corners him at the University one day, and threatens him, if not in so many words.

 

“She misses her, too, you know,” Leane says ten minutes into her visit, eyes roving over the books he’s got stacked on rickety metal shelves.

 

“I know,” he says quietly, hands spread flat on his desk.

 

“So go,” Leane says sharply. “Remind her that she’s not alone, that she’s not a fool for mourning a woman dead nearly a year.”

 

“Gareth--,” Lan starts, but Leane waves him off.

 

“Pah, like he counts.” She plants her hands on his desk, leans forward. “Gareth knew Moiraine, yes, but he didn’t know her. He saw her on holidays, and whenever Morgase got her head out of her ass, but that was it.”

 

“You--,” Lan tries again, but Leane glares him down.

 

“I wasn’t there, not at the beginning, not at the end,” Leane sighs, straightening. “She was. You were.”

 

“Fine,” he says after a long moment, the syllable clipped, like he didn’t actually want to let it out (he didn’t). “I’ll go.”

 

“Good,” Leane replies, still eyeing him like he’s going to wriggle out of the corner she’s boxed him into.

 

She leaves a quarter of an hour later, their conversation having shifted to trivialities that didn’t cover the past, and the pain buried in it. Lan watches her go with the feeling he’s just been bulldozed, but he’s used to it.

 

~~~

 

[EXCERPT from the BEGINNING of the contents of a LETTER written from 19 MAY 1999 to 22 MAY 1999]

 

Nynaeve,

 

Siuan (you remember Siuan, my old boss), anyway, Siuan’s asked me down to Gareth’s hometown (read: hot Georgian hell) for the summer (Gareth’s not quite her husband, not quite her boyfriend, but definitely the only man she’ll let touch her), and I’ve (after a definitive browbeating by Leane, Siuan’s ‘assistant’) decided to accept.

 

I’ll be gone from the twenty-second of this month until the fourteenth of August, so this is the last letter you’ll get for a while.

 

Which means that this’ll be a doozy….

 

[end EXCERPT]

 

~~~

 

She picks up Lan’s last letter on the twenty-fifth, though she’s not really sure she can call it a letter, not when it’s this thick. 

 

Elayne’s driving her, with Egwene in the backseat, the three of them off and on the way to somewhere that doesn’t look the tiniest bit like Chicago (or, as Egwene had put it earlier, somewhere that didn’t send their trauma patients to Northwestern). 

 

Elayne’s eyebrow wings up at the thick envelope, and Nynaeve just rolls her eyes. She’d told the others about Lan back in March, after Egwene had found her laughing over the hand kiss incident and the two of them had sat her down, looked very seriously at her eyes, and demanded she dish.

 

She puts the envelope in her bag, and leans back, content to sleep for the rest of the drive.  
~~~

 

The rest of the month goes smoothly, all things considered. Nynaeve limits herself to one page of Lan’s handwriting a day, drafting responses to the topics he brings up on a yellow notepad originally intended to be used for notes in one of her senior seminars, but has survived long enough to be used for scrap.

 

Cadsuane leaves for vacation at the beginning of June, and Nynaeve thinks she’s going to die. Most of her boss’ workload is dumped on her, and she suddenly has a huge amount of respect for Cadsuane’s leash on her temper. By the fifth day, Nynaeve’s blown up at two hospital administrators and one abusive spouse, and the interns have started clearing paths whenever they see her hand on her braid.

 

Imani doesn’t seem to be affected by her irritated state. The dog actually seems to be a fan of it, because it means that Nynaeve goes running more often, pounding out her frustrations into the sidewalks. Imani runs next to her, the two of them focused on some distant goal that neither can quite bring into focus. 

 

August brings her own vacation, a week at the beginning of the month that she spends up at her parents. Anantha takes one look at her, and tsks, eyes narrowing.

 

“Have you slept at all?” She asks, pushing Nynaeve through the halls, casually detouring a bit to let Imani out into the back yard.

 

“Umm, yes?” Nynaeve answers, trying to remember when, exactly, that was.

 

“Liar,” her mom replies cheerfully.

 

“I swear I did. At least once. Maybe. In the break room. For like an hour,” Nynaeve says, feeling like she’s fourteen again and her mom’s caught her at three in the morning with a book and a flashlight and a guilty expression.

 

Anantha just hums and pushes her into her room, takes the bag from her hand, and tells her daughter in her very best no nonsense voice, “Go to sleep. I’ll see you in a few hours.”

 

Nynaeve stares at the door after she’s gone, trying to process what had just happened. In the end, her exhaustion wins out, and she strips and changes into a worn pair of mesh shorts and a t-shirt she’s pretty sure is from her high school gym class. 

 

Lan’s letter is on top of her bag, and she pulls it out before sinking onto the bed. She’s only got a few pages left, though, and her own contribution to the letter writing campaign is nearing terminal thickness. Nynaeve gets halfway down her allotted page before her eyes refuse to stay open any longer.

 

~~~

 

Anantha finds her later, curled around the stack of paper, one hand resting on the top. She’s not quite sure who her daughter is writing to, or even why they’re writing, especially since e-mail is so very nice (if a bit of a hassle), and definitely cheaper, in terms of postage. But she knows, from hints Nynaeve has dropped, from the fact that her daughter was bone tired yet still attempted to read this person’s words before she fell asleep, that they must be important.

 

When she takes the stack from Nynaeve, she’s almost tempted to read the top page, to get a sense of the person behind them, but she restrains herself. Anantha has always been a patient woman, a trait almost required with a daughter as strong minded as her own, and she’s willing to wait just a little while longer.

 

~~~

 

Chapter Seven: September to October (1999/2001)

 

~  
“Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.”  
― Gabriel Garcí¬a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera  
~

 

When Lan gets home, there’s a brick waiting for him in the mailbox.

 

Well, not a brick, per se, but the mass of paper that Nynaeve has left for him weighs about as much as one, and is, he thinks, even thicker than the letter he sent her at the end of March. It goes on the counter as he starts to unpack, his suitcases getting dumped one by one into the middle of the floor as Imani follows him in and out of the house, occasionally pausing in the middle of the walkway to bark at the water underneath them. 

 

It’s a brisk day in terms of wind, though still hot, with leaves swirling up and out from the trees as a few of them loosen early in preparation for fall. Lan had thought he would have been cold, with the contrast between Georgia and Illinois being a sharp one, but the humidity of the city makes up for what it lacks in sheer heat. 

 

He’s not certain why, but it suddenly hits him that he’s nearly been here a year, and has been writing to Nynaeve for nearly as long. It doesn’t feel like a year, he muses as he opens all of his suitcases and starts throwing the clothes into a laundry basket. Doesn’t even feel like six months. Time hasn’t dragged, he realizes, not in the way it did after Moiraine’s death. Days haven’t felt like they’ve taken weeks to finish in a while, and he hasn’t lost himself in that constant spiral of regret and guilt.

 

“Damn it, Siuan,” he mutters with a slight twist of his lips that can’t quite be called a smile. She’d dragged him to Georgia, forced him to enjoy himself (if being forced to redo Mrs. Bryne’s roof can be called ‘enjoying oneself’, which Lan severely doubts), and somehow pushed him out of the back end of a funk he’d spent several months and a decent supply of alcohol and self-pity creating. If she somehow revealed that she’d arranged for Lan to move back into his parents house and discover that his mailbox defied the laws of reality he, at this point, wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.

 

~~~

 

Regularity sets in after he returns, with a portion of his day set aside for reading and responding to Nynaeve’s book of a letter. 

 

At some point he thinks they’re going to have to pare this down, because he can’t be writing or reading this many pages every time. It surpasses even what he thinks the standard long distance letter size was in a less advanced age, before telephones and rapid transport. He’s basing all of this on a half memory of Pride and Prejudice, but he thinks it’s a fair comparison.

 

It helps that, although he’s focusing mainly on the Never Ending Epistle, he and Nynaeve are still exchanging their normal range of short notes over the weeks that both she and he have been back. They’ve devolved into ridiculous things now, with a lot of “I talked more about this here so just wait”s mixed in with the usual daily anecdotes and occasional musings about on the job hazards. Lan’s have decreased significantly since he stopped doing bodyguard work, but he’s got enough experience with it to match Nynaeve tit for tat.

 

Mat swings by the house on the Friday before the semester starts, having retained his job as Lan’s TA. He brings with him a tall red headed boy that he introduces as Rand, and Lan ends up talking to him as Mat fills out some last minute forms and shuffles through the stack of papers Lan already has for him. 

 

Rand’s quiet for the most part, with a smile that’s got part of Mat’s edge, and eyes that look older than dirt. His father is someone Lan recognizes, one of Davram Bashere’s friends, and an occasional guest lecturer at the University. No matter what his smile holds, though, the kid’s a sharp contrast to Mat, the two of them rubbing against each other with barbs instead of smooth surfaces. When the two of them walk back to their car, leaving Lan on the porch alone, he still isn’t quite sure what to make of them together.

 

Imani comes out of the house while he’s staring after their dust trail, still thinking. She flops at his feet, and pants, the sound running over top of the slap of water against the support posts. It’s quiet, it’s peaceful, and it’s something he wasn’t ever sure he’d have.

 

Life, he’d say, if he were brave enough to say it out loud,, and just the tiniest bit less superstitious, was good.

 

~~~

 

It’s the second week of September, and Nynaeve’s at work. Both Elayne and Egwene are in, and Cadsuane is cutting through the masses like a steamship who refuses to bow, even to an iceberg. Nynaeve’s been on since 2100 last night, and her shift is almost done, a fact that she’s holding in front of herself like a carrot to keep herself from finding the nearest closet and taking a nap on one of the mops. Her last patient, a Mr. Galloway, is nice enough, even though he’s very clear that he doesn’t want to be here. His daughter, a Ms. Galloway, had brought him in yesterday, and is now making faces behind his back as she watches one of Chicago’s local news channels. 

 

“Mr. Galloway,” Nynaeve says patiently, “you cannot go home.”

 

“Why not?” The old man asks, pushing himself up and nearly capsizing his IV stand as he goes. “Why can’t I go home? Is it Dorothea? She tell you I need to stay here?” He squints up at Nynaeve and drops his voice to a loud whisper. “Girl worries too much. Gets it from her mother, god rest her.”

 

Nynaeve almost smiles, but then manages to keep her face straight. “Your daughter did tell us that you needed to stay here, though it was only after we told her why we wanted you--” She’s interrupted by a gasp from Dorothea, and both she and Mr. Galloway turn to look. The girl’s staring straight up, eyes fixed on the television screen, hand fumbling for the remote. It’s as she turns it up that Nynaeve looks away from her face and towards what she’s staring at, and what she sees is nothing less than hell.

 

The newscaster looks pinched, her eyes a bit frantic, and she’s reading straight from a piece of paper instead of a teleprompter. Next to her is a shaky video, probably from one of those newer cell phones with the camera, that looks like it had been taken from the street of a large city, New York, maybe, or Philadelphia. Nynaeve’s confused, her mind refusing to read the crawl, her ears not quite understanding what the woman is saying, until the plane hits the building in front of whoever’s recording that video, and the screams start.

 

She’s frozen, is what she notices first. They all are. Mr. Galloway is quiet for once, his wheezing breaths his only contribution to the haze of screaming and desperate calm emanating from the television. Dorothea Galloway looks like she’s just been strangled, her mouth open and her eyes popped wide, and Nynaeve can’t figure out why she’s thinking in death metaphors, especially now, when it’s so far beyond a metaphor and blasting into an all too painful reality.

 

“I...I have to go,” Nynaeve says, and flees, angry at herself for standing there like a lug, and angry at the world for producing a massive tragedy that she has no hope of fixing. She runs into Cadsuane almost literally, saved only by the fact that the other woman sees her coming and spins out of the way, one hand catching her arm and holding fast. Holding hard.

 

“Have you--,” Nynaeve starts, and Cadsuane nods sharply. “Have they--,” she tries again, and Cadsuane smiles grimly.

 

“They will,” her boss says, “and soon. If not from those newfangled phones of theirs, then from the TV, and the patients going out. It’s on every channel, and no one can resist looking at a TV screen, not for long.”

 

“What do we--,” Nynaeve almost stops herself this time, Cadsuane’s interruptions becoming almost habit. Fortunately, she’s not disappointed, and is saved from looking like a complete idiot by Cadsuane speaking over top of her.

 

“Nothing,” she says heavily. “We do nothing. We can do nothing. It’s New York. We’re in Chicago. The people here don’t stop dying and doing stupid shit because the country is going to hell.”

 

Nynaeve nods, and does her best to stride off in a manner that can be described as confident. It gets harder and harder, because she’s almost about to leave when the second plane hits. She ends up in the break room, dazed from lack of sleep and horror at what’s unfolding in front of her. Egwene joins her around nine-thirty, just before the third plane hits Washington, D.C, and Nynaeve’s shaken out of her funk enough to realize that the room is packed. 

 

Nurses and doctors are going off shift, but instead of going home, they’re here, eyes fixed on a fuzzy television that’s almost a decade old, all of them silent except for one of the charge nurses, who’s weeping in one of the chairs, her face buried in the shoulder of a friend. By ten forty-five, it’s all over, but none of them go anywhere. The news reports are getting redundant, and Nynaeve thinks she has the images of the towers going down burned into her retinas. 

 

Elayne’s down by now, done with her shift an hour after Egwene and Nynaeve, and the three of them leave together as well. They don’t discuss it, but somehow all three of them end up at Nynaeve’s apartment. Imani’s jumping at them in excitement, not understanding why they’re unusually quiet, and desperate for at least one belly rub. Elayne cracks first, kneeling down to scratch her ears. Egwene follows, then Nynaeve, and then they’re all on the floor, crying and petting a dog, and so pointlessly angry that they can’t do anything to change what’s happened.

 

~~~

 

In the middle of the night, after they’ve flipped off the news and forced themselves to watch something cheerful (Nynaeve’s copy of The Princess Bride wins by a wide margin), they’re on the floor again, though this time they’re in the living room instead of the entry way, and there are no tears. The conversation has hit a lull, and Nynaeve’s staring blindly out at the kitchen, eyes bouncing from the microwave clock, to the oven clock, to the clock on the wall, all of them ticking down to a morning she doesn’t quite want to face, but knows she has to.

 

Lan’s letter is there on the counter, the few sheets of paper outlined in the golden light from the living room, and Nynaeve’s stomach bottoms out. “Oh god,” she groans, and rolls over to stare at the ceiling.

 

“What?” Elayne says absently, and in that moment Nynaeve makes a Decision. She starts talking, doesn’t even look to see if the others are paying attention, just lets the whole thing spill out. She tells them about the house, about the mailbox, about the dog, and Lan, and time travel. She talks about how she thinks she might like him, maybe even love him, at least enough to seriously ask him to meet her. Or to remember to meet her. She isn’t sure which, but the semantics don’t stop her. 

 

She’s on a roll, and the fact that both Egwene and Elayne have sat up and are staring at her doesn’t matter. All that matters is that she get it all out, including her fear that she can’t keep this hidden, can’t cover up the fact that so very many people are going to suffer. She’s not sure she wants to, she says after a short moment of silence. Isn’t sure that she won’t get it in her head that telling Lan isn’t the ‘something’ she’s been searching for all day, the one thing she can do in reaction to this crisis.

 

When she runs out of air and things to say, she closes her eyes and sits up, back to her friends. They’re quiet, though not as quiet as the break room earlier, still and silent with the shock of mass death. 

 

“I knew it,” Egwene finally says. “I knew you weren’t just writing some crusty old friend of your mom’s.” Nynaeve thinks, if it had been appropriate, and if Nynaeve were looking, she’d have been jumping up and down , as well as pointing. Hell, she’s mildly surprised that Egwene hasn’t.

 

“Nobody’s that dedicated to family friends,” Elayne adds, and Nynaeve turns around to see them both smiling at her.

 

“You, ah,” Nynaeve starts, hating the fact that she’s so uncertain, but able to do nothing about it. “You believe me?”

 

“It’s a little far fetched,” Elayne admits.

 

“A lot far fetched,” Egwene says, “But you’re not the type to make this sort of thing up.”

 

Nynaeve’s slightly offended by that, though she’s not quite sure why, and besides, it’s irrelevant.

 

“Wait,” Elayne says, holding a hand up, then looking at Nynaeve head on. “You said you met him?”

 

“Apparently,” Nynaeve says, fingering the tip of her braid.

 

Her friends lean forward, and say in unison, “Details. Now.”

 

She laughs, and the rest of the night is spent trying to drudge up what she remembers of al’Lan Mandragoran, a name she’s still not sure she’s saying right.

 

~~~

 

Nynaeve doesn’t write any more letters. Or, to be fair, not very many. She tries to keep up with Lan, tries to keep herself from dwelling on the events of what they’re now calling 9/11, as if the date itself will be forever marred by the events that occurred. 

 

She manages until the end of September, a few days after Lan delivers his brick of a response, and then she just can’t, not any more. His last letter goes into a box, unread, and she drafts her last response on a piece of white computer paper, leaving it for him on the first day in October, Imani leaning out of the car as she does so, the breeze coming off the lake blowing away her tears before she has the chance to blink them out.

 

~~~

 

[contents of a LETTER written on 28 SEPTEMBER 2001]

 

Lan,

 

I can’t keep doing this. 

 

I can’t...I can’t keep talking to someone I can never see, someone I can’t even talk to about current events, because yours are two years old for me, and mine might as well be revelations from god for how current they are. 

 

So this is it. The last letter. I’m done. 

 

Live well, 

 

Nynaeve al’Meara

 

[end LETTER]

 

~~~

 

When he gets it, he’s not sure he’s read it correctly, thinks it must be a joke. Some horrible, awful, misplaced joke that doesn’t translate well over mailbox communication methods. Two weeks into October, and he’s figured out that it isn’t a joke, and that she really isn’t going to write to him anymore. 

 

Lan feels gutted.

 

He hadn’t been aware, before, of how much of his improved outlook on life relied on Nynaeve being in it. He’d thought it was Siuan, or Leane, or hell, even Gareth Bryne, especially after the summer. Now, however, Nynaeve is gone, and there’s nothing he can do about it, and his foundation is rocking. He’s angry about that, he realizes, angry that he’d leaned so much on someone who owed him nothing, and wasn’t even aware of the fact that they were being used as a human crutch. 

 

Her book is still here, he realizes after a while, the cover bent but the title still legible through the creases. Love In The Time Of Cholera mocks him, because he’s certain that it’s about true love winning out, or at least true connections, and he’d thought that, if nothing else, he and Nynaeve had had one of those.

 

~~~

 

Lan reads the book over the next week, snatching bits of it during staff meetings and before bed, occasionally reading it out loud to Imani and the ever constant waves of the lake.

 

And it’s not. 

 

About true love winning out, that is. Oh, it is, in a sense, but there’s more to it than that. It’s about pain, and loss, and suffering. It’s about separation and foolish dreams, and it’s almost entirely too apt. 

 

Needless to say, it gives him a lot to think about.  
~~~

 

Chapter Eight: 05 November (1999/2001)

 

~  
“Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.”  
― Gabriel Garcí¬a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera  
~

 

Guy Fawkes day is blessedly quiet in the Emergency Room.

 

Nynaeve’s only even aware of the holiday because a group of children had come through on a tour of the pediatrics ward while she was checking on a case two floors above, and she’d gotten stuck in an elevator full of kids reciting the Gunpowder Plot.

 

“Remember, remember, the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason, and plot,” she mutters, and grimaces slightly. They’d had their treason and plot two months ago, and that plan had unfortunately gone off better than Guy Fawkes’ intention to blow up the British Parliament. 

 

The date’s been nagging at her for another reason, one she can’t quite figure, but she pushes it out of her mind. 

 

Cadsuane’s on a warpath right now, her tight bun and formidable eyebrows raised in battle against the Director of Social Work, a conflict Nynaeve feels no need to get involved in. The slowness of the day ensures that she’s got time enough for the lunch she’s packed (going out for lunch is out of the question, especially with the level of security she’d had to pass through just to get in to the hospital).

 

Elayne finds her in the break room, munching on a tupperware container’s worth of leftover pasta, a slight frown twisting her face.

 

“There you are,” Elayne says abruptly, wending her way through the scattered furniture. “I need to talk to you.”

 

“What’s up?” Nynaeve asks, twirling a noodle around her plastic fork.

 

“What was your guy’s name again? Allen something, right?” Elayne asks as Nynaeve takes a bite, her frown not lessening.

 

“Alflan Mundrafgorfun,” Nynaeve says promptly, then swallows. “Al’Lan Mandragoran,” she repeats now that her mouth is clear of food.

 

“Fuck,” Elayne whispers, then sits down.

 

Nynaeve had been about to take another bite, but she pauses, and looks at Elayne instead. “What’s wrong?”

 

“I was down in the morgue just now,” Elayne starts, and Nynaeve nods, not sure where this is going. “And Michaelson’s assistant is transferring the files over onto digital copies,” Elayne continues, “and uh, he’d reached the ‘M’s.” Nynaeve nods again, a slight curl of dread starting in her stomach.

 

“And I knocked a huge pile off his desk and paper went everywhere, and I was picking them up and I saw one of them was an Al’Lan Mandragoran and I remembered because he had such a funny name,” Elayne says in a huge rush, and Nynaeve can’t even nod anymore. Elayne keeps going anyway. “And I opened it and...he died, Nynaeve.

 

“Last year today,” Elayne swallows, then blurts out the last bit. “You were the attending physician.”

 

Nynaeve thinks she’s drowning. She’d always had a sort of half formed hope that Lan would take her last letter as a challenge, would wait until their times synced up, would come and find her. And he had.

 

He’d also died.

 

She stands up in a haze of black and numbness, and starts walking towards the door. She thinks she mumbles something about needing to go, but she’s not quite sure. Elayne doesn’t follow her, though, and Cadsuane doesn’t stop her on her way out of the sliding glass of the Emergency Room doors. She finds her car, snaps out of it enough to feel like she’s driving safely, then heads towards the lake.

 

When she gets to the house, she’s not even sure if she’s got a pen and paper, doesn’t even know if Lan will look. It’s ridiculous to be sending this now, almost a year out (or a year back, she’s never hated time travel and their attendant paradoxes as she does now) from his death, but she can’t help herself.

 

A pen is found, and the paper ends up being from a pad she’d stuffed in the glove box almost a month before after a grocery run. The scribbled out list that’s still attached is ripped out, and the only way her handwriting stays neat is because she reminds herself that if Lan can’t read her warning, then it’s pointless.

 

She slams it in the mailbox, and then breathes heavily, eyes fixed on the flag. When it doesn’t move after a half an hour, she leaves, praying that somehow she’d managed to do something, even if all that something was was to prevent the death of one man. 

 

One man in the face of thousands isn’t a choice she’d even thought she’d have to use, but there it is.

 

~~~

 

[contents of a LETTER written on 05 NOVEMBER 2001]

 

Lan,

 

Whatever you do, do not come to me. 

 

Don’t search for me. 

 

Don’t see me in a cafe across a busy street a year from now and try to get to me.

 

Especially not that.

 

It ends badly, Lan. Paradoxes aside, I can’t have you die on me, not again. Not ever.

 

Stay away. Stay alive.

 

I love you.

 

Nynaeve

 

[end LETTER]  
~~~

 

Epilogue: August 2003

 

~  
“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”  
― Gabriel Garcí¬a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera  
~

 

He never writes back.

 

Nynaeve has been living in the house on the lake, having moved out of her apartment and the city in December of 2001, a month after she’d sent that last note. She’s not even really sure of how it would work, or if she’d remember anything of the last year, since it was Lan’s death (thinking that phrase still hurts), that prompted her to go back to the house on the lake. She’d like to think that she’d have gone anyway, eventually, but she honestly doesn’t know.

 

Regardless of potential wipes of memory, she’d checked that mailbox every day for that first month, hoping that there’d be something waiting for her. The mailbox remained stubbornly empty, however, and somewhere around February of 2002 she gave up.  
She reads Lan’s letter one week, going through the pages like she’s been starving. She’s crying by the end of it, more from the potential loss than the content, but tears are tears, and they end up staining the whole of the last page.

 

Imani’s still with her, though the dog is getting on in years. Anantha had offered to take her in, to keep her safe from the dangers of falling into the lake now that her balance was starting to go. Nynaeve had laughed, and said that she’d be more likely to fall into the lake than the dog, but she was starting to consider taking her mother up on the offer.

 

Cadsuane had retired from the hospital, if you could call coming back in every month or so to terrorize the administration ‘retired’. Egwene and Elayne were still there, slowly gaining seniority in their departments as people cycle in and out, either going to higher positions at other hospitals, or being burnt out by the sheer grind of the work they do.

 

~~~

 

It’s August now, her usual vacation time, and she’s vacationing, stretched out on a recliner on the porch, hat on her head, and book forgotten in a heap on the floor. It’s peaceful, with the bugs droning, the waves slapping, and the occasional rush of a car down the road reminding her that she’s still a part of civilization.

 

The quiet is broken by a bark from Imani, who’d been laying in the brightest patch of sun, located right where the walkway met the porch of the house. Her bark is followed by the grind of tires on gravel, and then she’s clattering across the wooden boards, nails scrabbling for purchase on the old wood.

 

Nynaeve sits up at the slam of a car door, stands up when Imani disappears behind the hood of the black truck that’s now parked in her driveway, her frantically wagging tail the only visible part of her. She’s halfway down the walkway when the man who’d clearly managed to seduce her dog in less than ten seconds (not an easy feat) straightens up and turns around, and then she’s having difficulty breathing.

 

He walks towards her, stopping before his boots hit the wood of the walkway, and she’s almost stupidly glad for that.

 

“You’re supposed to be dead,” she manages, and Lan--because it is Lan, older than she remembers, with much shorter hair, hair that’s a lot more grey than it used to be, and a body that’s a lot less broken and bloody and dead than she remembers it--raises an eyebrow.

 

“Someone told me not to go to the city on that day,” he says, and his voice is harsh, like he’s been screaming for a long time and doesn’t remember how to talk with a normal volume.

 

“Where,” Nynaeve starts, anger boiling slightly in her chest. “Where have you been? Couldn’t you have at least told me, ‘hey, I got your note, I’ll try not to die next year, maybe see you later?’ Or, I don’t know, something?”

 

“Wasn’t sure you’d remember me,” Lan says amicably.

 

“Wasn’t sure--,” Nynaeve cuts herself off and fumes silently.

 

“As to where I was...didn’t go anywhere until 9/11--That was why you stopped sending letters, right?” Nynaeve nods, and he continues. “That’s what I thought. Anyway, after that, around January of 2002, I got hired as a civilian contractor. I was in Afghanistan, Nynaeve. Managing security for the Army, as well as some other things I can’t talk about.”

 

“And is there no postal service in Afghanistan?” Nynaeve thinks she’s managed a calm voice, but she’s not sure. It could also be the voice of a murderer, and to be honest, she’s feeling more of the latter than the former at the moment. 

 

“There is,” Lan admits, the slight crinkle at the corner of his eyes telling her that he knows where she’s going with this.

 

“And you couldn’t, I don’t know, send a letter? You were pretty good at that, last time I checked,” she stops, then says almost offhandedly, “by that time you were caught up with me, too. Didn’t even have to leave it in a magic mailbox. Just had to bloody address it to me.”

 

“And say what?” Lan asks. “That you saved me from dying, and now here I was in Kabul, waiting to get myself blown up? Would that have helped?”

 

“Yes,” Nynaeve said through gritted teeth. “Because that would have meant that you were alive, and instead of dying on me you were out in the world doing something.” She looks at him for a moment, then narrows her eyes. “The house.”

 

“What about it?”

 

“It was yours.”

 

“So it was.”

 

“So you sold it to me.”

 

“And?”

 

“And not once during that whole process could you have popped by to say hello?” Nynaeve’s almost shouting at this point, and Imani’s watching them both like a fascinating game of pinball.

 

“Nope. Kabul, remember?” If Nynaeve wouldn’t have had to murder him in order to do it, she’d kill him. Kill him right here, on her lawn. Even after she’d gone through /so/ much trouble to keep him alive.

 

“Arrrrgh,” she’s reduced to screaming, closing her eyes and trying very hard to to take too much enjoyment at the thought of committing homicide. Unfortunately, Imani picks that exact moment to rush back from Lan to Nynaeve, hitting her solidly in the lower legs, enough, combined with the fact that she’d closed her eyes, to send her over the side and down the ten foot something drop to the lake below.

 

She comes up sputtering, and Lan’s fighting laughter and Imani just looks so damn pleased with herself, and Nynaeve’s had enough. She swims over to the planter that holds the tree’s roots and hauls herself up out of the water, and sets herself to wringing the water out of her hair. She doesn’t know where her hat’s gone, and can’t really bring herself to care.

 

A splash echoes under the house a minute later, and there’s Lan, soaking wet and cutting a relatively decent breaststroke towards her. Nynaeve can see his shoes on the walkway, Imani sitting next to them, panting and looking down in the judgemental way only dogs can manage.

 

“Worse than a bloody cat,” she mutters, only to shriek when Lan--and about sixty pounds of water--hoists himself up next to her.

 

“I didn’t want to leave,” he says quietly, looking over at her. “But after what happened, with us, and with 9/11...I had to do something. And when I made that decision, I couldn’t just tell you that I was here, and alive, and then going on what sounded like a suicide mission.”

 

Lan sighs. “Not the best way to pay you back, you know?”

 

“I know,” Nynaeve says after a minute. “I don’t like it, but I know. And if I had been anything other than a doctor, I would have been right there with you.”

 

He lets out a short laugh. “What, on a suicide mission?”

 

“No, you idiot, in Kabul. Or Baghdad. Or anywhere. Not necessarily with you, but doing something useful.” She looks out over the water, gives her own sigh. “You died, and I went to pieces. And then you started writing to me, and put them all back together. What happened then, and you not writing me back…It shattered me all over again.”

 

“Me, too,” he admits. “I was a wreck after Moiraine, didn’t think I could be a bodyguard anymore, but also didn’t think I could do anything else. You…” He falls silent for a bit, before starting again. “You were the foundation I rebuilt myself on without even realizing it. And when you stopped writing...I had a moment where I wasn’t sure where I stood, or if I stood.”

 

“Did you figure that one out, at least?”

 

“After a while, yeah,” Lan says. “Took a few knocks to the head, but I figured it out.”

~~~

Siuan Sanche pushes back from her desk, her back cracking from the strain of sitting for so long.

“He’s going to figure it out at some point,” a voice says from behind her, and she turns to find Gareth Bryne watching her in the semi-dark, his face a study in contrasting shadows.

“Find out what,” Siuan says, even though she knows very well what, as does Gareth.

“That you knew about the mailbox. Not necessarily about Nynaeve, but you did know about that.”

Siuan just widens her eyes and waits.

Gareth grimaces. “So you did know about Nynaeve. Arranged for her to rent the place, I reckon, and let her keep taking it back for cheap. Probably futzed with the mail service as well.”

“That’s a felony, Bryne,” Siuan points out.

“Has that ever stopped you before?” Gareth asks, an eyebrow going up

“Well, no,” Siuan admits. “But the mail, that was Leane.”

“Clever,” Gareth says.

“I’d hoped you’d say that.”

“What else would I say?” Gareth inquires, the silk in his voice a blatant lie.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Siuan says, walking towards him. “How could you Siuan, how dare you Siuan, people are not puppets Siuan, you know,” she scrunched her face up, “the basic rant.”

“I was going to thank you, actually,” Gareth says, and then rocks back on his heels, bracing himself for what comes next.

“What,” Siuan shouts, at a decibel level that won’t be audible to his ears for long. 

Gareth shrugs. “Lan was—is—my friend just as much as Moiraine was. Maybe more. It was hard seeing him spiral so hard. The fact that you brought him back, no matter how…unorthodox your methods, well. That means something to me. So, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Siuan says in a grudging tone, still sounding more than a little shocked at his revelation.

“However,” Gareth adds, and there’s steel this time. “I wouldn’t try to meddle with him anymore. The man’s happy, let him stay that way. Interfere on sever grounds only, like either him or Nynaeve getting severely ill.”

He leans forward and kisses her after that, a reasonable reaction, seeing as she’d walked that close for a reason. Then he walks away, and leaves her standing in her office.

“You ever going to tell him?” This time it’s Leane, standing in the opposite door.

“Tell him what?”

“What Moiraine did to you and him, to get you together.”

Siuan snorts. “It’s rude to speak ill of the dead.”

“What if the dead seem pretty keen on being rude themselves?” Leane asks.

“Then you through a bucket of salt in their faces and scream the first Latin thing you can think of,” Siuan says, knowing it’s immature, but unable to help herself.

“But you heard what he said, right?” Lean paces slightly, then turns back to Siuan. “Lan’s happy.”

“And?” Siuan says, digging herself in for the long haul.

“Were you happy? When Moiraine ‘managed’ you, I mean.”

“No,” Siuan says flatly. “I was not happy. I was murderous, definitely. Slightly in lust with that ridiculous man. But no, not happy. Not until much later.”

“There’s the difference,” Leane says. “You care if they’re happy at the end of it, or hell, even during it. Moiraine just wanted the results. She didn’t give a shit if you were miserable all the way up to the wedding, it was the wedding that counted.”  
“You and I weren’t any different,” Siuan points out.

“Ah, but we learned,” Leane says. “She never did.”

“Never had a chance to,” Siuan says.

“Oh, she had a chance,” Leane says. “Many chances. She ignored them all.”

Siuan scowls, but Leane is right.

“And,” says the woman in question, “with that, I think I’ll leave you.”

“Don’t forget to break the wormhole on the mailbox,” Siuan calls after her.

“What am I, an amateur?” Leane scoffs, and then sweeps completely out.

~~~

 

Second Epilogue: December 2003

 

~  
“It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them.”  
― Gabriel Garcí¬a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera  
~

It had been, Nynaeve thought, a rather good six months or so.

 

Lan had fully moved back from Afghanistan, his suitcases battered and worn, his possessions barely enough to fill a single room, let alone several. Fittingly enough, Lan moves into her old apartment, picking it up as the lease for the previous tenant expired. They were dating, she and him, in a way that more solidly resembled the traditional model than their old arrangement. Which wasn’t to say they weren’t writing letters anymore. They were. They just had to opportunity to deliver them in person, to talk face to face, to push past the barriers of pen and paper.

 

Siuan Sanche, Lan’s old boss, had invited them to Thanksgiving last month. Nynaeve had secured permission for her mother and father to attend, and from what she can tell, Siuan and her mother had hit it off. That particular prospect scared her greatly, as she was already convinced that her mother could assume control of the United States relatively easily, and to put her next to a woman who seemed like she could reasonably rule the world was concerning, to put it mildly. Gareth and her father had even exchanged a few words of intense discussion over some topic or other, Nynaeve can’t remember.

 

Mat had been there, with the girl he’d been dating since college, Tuon. Gareth had invited them, through Davram Bashere, a bearded man who was floating around somewhere and making grand gestures about alcohol and various military maneuvers. She asks him about Rand while he’s there, and Perrin, all the old crowd. She’s been so busy in Chicago that she hasn’t had the chance to visit Emondsfeld. The gossip is good though, makes her feel like she’s back in the swing of things.

 

Lan’s back teaching at the school; Bashere’s eyes had lit up like Christmas trees when he mentioned that he was back to stay, and he managed to finagle Lan into two semesters definitely, with the option to add more. Nynaeve rather thought he would. There was something about his face that afternoon he was talking about the Risk that just lit up at the thought of teaching these kids. It came from loving your subject, Nynaeve knew, and she wished she had as much of a passion for teaching the sciences as she did practicing them.

 

Leane had invited, of all people, Elayne. She apparently knew her through her mother, or some other convoluted connection. Nynaeve didn’t care; with Elayne came Egwene, and she had known that no matter how awkward this dinner ended up getting, if the two of them were there, Nynaeve would end up enjoying herself immensely. Nynaeve had handled the rounds of introductions, not missing the wide eyes that Egwene and Elayne still gave Lan every time they saw him unawares. She supposed it was hard to conceive of him as alive after thinking he was dead for so long, especially without the near constant exposure she gets to the man.

 

Now, a month later, it was the end of December, inching fast towards Christmas and the New Year. Nynaeve was scheduled to work Christmas, but she had Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve off, so she counted that among her achievements. Lan was off, clearly, his job at the school not starting ‘til mid-January, and he was in charge of decorating. He was stringing lights and hanging stockings at her house, though, instead of his apartment, as they’d decided to spend most of the holidays together. Nynaeve had half forgotten that she’d agreed to let him do it until she came home, and found the glass oddity she’d come to call home glowing softly in the twilight.

 

“I love it,” she said, after Lan had come out onto the porch, wrapped her in his arms, lifted her a tad and kissed her, a slow slide of lips and tongue that promised more later. “Though…isn’t it a bit pointless? I mean, no one can see it but us.”

 

“And the fishersen,” he said absently, wrapping his arms around her waist, and pulling her flush against his body, her head tilted back and resting on his shoulder as they both stared at the lights around them. “Besides, the effect they’ve got on the water is worth it.”

 

“I’m just hoping Imani doesn’t jump in the water to try and play with the lights,” Nynaeve says drily, “at least not until my mom comes to get her.”

 

“You finally going to let Anantha keep her?” Lan asks, bending down and pressing a kiss to the top of her head, before going back to watching the effects of man made beauty on the nature that inspired it.

 

“I think so,” Nynaeve says, her toes curling slightly at the gently touch. “Especially since she’s right. Imani is getting old, and she needs to live somewhere other than a rickety old house that can go down in the next storm.”

 

“Hey,” Lan says, affecting a tone of mock offense. “This house isn’t rickety. My dad built it, and I helped.”

 

“Not helping your case any,” Nynaeve points out, then laughs as he sweeps her up and inside, growling silly things about impertinent people and their just desserts. 

~~~  
Lan is undeniably happy.

Siuan had pointed it out on Thanksgiving, in a manner a less forgiving man would have described as scheming. Or perhaps cackling. Either way, Lan isn’t too terribly interested in arguing with her, as he is actually happy, happier than he’s been in a while, even while Moiraine was alive.

Leane had just smiled at him while Siuan made her pronouncement, and for some reason, that scares him more than anything else, except for maybe Nynaeve’s mother. Anantha’s been after him to let her take Imani for about two months now, always coming up with better reasons for why the old girl would be better suited to life on solid land. 

Anantha has that look also, that look that says she saw him coming from a mile off, and still inexplicably approves. Approves a little too much, from why Nynaeve says, and he’s inclined to agree. So far, she hasn’t mentioned marriage, but both he and Nynaeve feel that it’s only a matter of time.

Gareth, bless the man, hadn’t said anything, a feat that Lan was singularly impressed with. He’d just talked with Nynaeve’s father quietly, and reined in Bashere whenever he got too enthusiastic with the wine fuelled gesticulations. 

Mat being there had been…interesting, and he thinks it’s only because the kid’s long out of college that he didn’t have a breakdown right there in the middle of Siuan’s floor.

Nynaeve’s mother aside, though, time is one thing they do seem to have on their side these days. No two year gap, no horrible secrets about the future to be held tight to the vest. Just them, and a house by the lake.

He’s outside, and it’s New Years. Snow is falling, the flakes melting into the water, which hasn’t quite frozen yet, even if the top layer looks like almost solid slush by this point. The lights from Christmas still glint off of the glass and the water; he won’t be taking them down until spring, to avoid the possibility of falling into the partially frozen lake.

“Life is good,” Lan says after a minute, his voice musing, before stepping back inside the house to watch the ball drop with Nynaeve.

Superstition be damned.

FIN

**Author's Note:**

> The city of Chicago is abused heavily in this fic, and any and all inaccuracies are at once deliberate and completely accidental, and I apologize to any residents of the Windy City trying to orient themselves in my writing. 
> 
> Also heavily twisted for my purposes are as follows: the concept of wormholes, the operations of a hospital, the operations of a university from a faculty point of view, the plot of The Lake House, and generally anything actually based in reality.


End file.
